


A Neutral Position

by youreillusive



Category: Marvel, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom, Thor (Movies), Thor - All Media Types
Genre: AU where Pietro lives because my heart can't handle an accent that beautiful never being heard again, F/M, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-03-31 19:30:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 34,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3990013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youreillusive/pseuds/youreillusive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"The struggle against war and its social source, capitalism, presupposes direct, active, unequivocal support to the oppressed colonial peoples in their struggles and wars against imperialism.  A ‘neutral’ position is tantamount to support of imperialism."</i>
</p><p> </p><p>An exploration of culture shock and identity building.  Who are you when the cause you’ve fought your entire life for isn’t there anymore?  Do you tear yourself down and build yourself back up again?  Or have you always existed, somewhere underneath the rubble of the shattered remains of your past?</p><p>Pietro Maximoff and Darcy Lewis struggle with what it means to be human in a world where you can be so much more.  They question what it means to fight the good fight, whether such a thing even exists, and whether there are other options.  But mostly, they struggle with themselves and each other and what it means to be together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Stark Tower is Dripping in Blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't written anything creative for years so this is going to be a bit bumpy in the beginning as I work out the kinks of my voice and style as an author. 
> 
> Also, this is my first fanfic ever, so, umm, any and ALL feedback is really appreciated! Like you would not imagine how helpful it would be! Critiques and criticism SUPER WELCOMED and actually kind of encouraged. Please criticize, please! It can only help me make the story more interesting and enjoyable for you :)

The Maximoffs loathed everything about Stark Tower and they made no attempt to hide their opinions on the matter. Perhaps what they loathed most was that Stark, and nearly everyone else they encountered, insisted on referring to it as the Avengers’ Tower. As if anyone other than Stark had anything to do with the building itself and what lay within. The paintings on the walls were his, the elaborate rugs lining the floor so no heavy steppers with unclean shoes could damage the thousand dollar wood beneath were his, the leather couches were his, the chandeliers were his, even the statues whose eyes seemed to follow you wherever you went were his, making it feel as if Stark’s eyes were on you no matter where you stepped foot. It was all _his_. 

To imply that any of the other Avengers had anything to do with the tower was a sick joke. And Pietro and Wanda were not laughing. A person would have to be either naive or idiotic to think that anyone other than Stark had a hand in the creation and furnishing of the Avengers Tower, even now. And Wanda and Pietro were neither naive nor foolish. They didn't have that luxury.

Perhaps the worst part of living in Stark Tower - _not_ Avenger’s Tower, because neither Wanda nor Pietro were willing to call it anything more than what it was - was that everyone seemed to think the disgust and unease the Maximoffs felt at their relocation from Hydra headquarters to Avengers headquarters was completely natural.

“Have we made a mistake?” Pietro’s voice was soft against his sister’s ear when he first discovered that the others expected them to be discontent with the new living situation, “It is a sign, no? That all of the others think it is usual to be so uncomfortable in this place.”

“No one truly _wants_ to live here, Pietro,” Wanda had murmured back, her eyes dancing rapidly between the faces gathered around them, the way they did when she was learning all the dark places humans secret away in their minds, “It is a place you go when there is no where else.”

And the pain that lanced through twin hearts weighed all the more heavily with the truth of her words. The pain of truth will always weigh more than the pain of lies. It is why the lies slip more easily from the tongue and the truth often stays trapped in the throat.

Pietro did not speak of it again, but it was not the last Wanda heard of his distrust, distaste, and disapproval. She did not have the luxury of only hearing disapproval when it was voiced aloud. 

The other Avengers, for their part, remained undisturbed by - and surprisingly understanding of - the Maximoffs as they continued to show their displeasure for the first few weeks. They were given time to settle in. Their open disregard for their surroundings, and their host, was excused. It was to be expected, the others openly agreed amongst themselves. After all the Maximoffs had just traveled thousands of miles to a new country for the first time in their lives. They were surrounded by a language that wasn’t their first language, by a people that probably couldn’t point out their home country on a map, and by a landscape that didn’t match anything even vaguely familiar to any place in the entire nation of Sokovia! Of _course_ they would act a little hostile. Of _course_ they would be a little “out of sorts,” as Dr. Banner so professionally described it. They had also just left the “belly of the beast,” as Stark put it, known to the outside world simply as Hydra’s headquarters. And what a beast Hydra was. Every Avenger understood what a head trip it must be for the Maximoffs to be Hydra one day, Avengers the next. A few of the Avengers even suspected brain washing during their time in Hydra’s claws, which allowed the Maximoff’s even more time to “readjust.” 

What no one understood was that what the Maximoffs felt when relocating to Stark Tower was not culture shock. What they felt when stepping outside the door to the busy streets of New York City was not uncertainty of how to present themselves to strangers on the street or how to properly behave in American society. They weren’t terrified of new social standards and expectations. It wasn’t about moving from Eastern Europe, from Sokovia, to the United States. What they felt wasn’t a sense of loss at hearing English spoken everywhere instead of the Sokovian that made them feel comfortable. They didn’t feel detached at seeing nothing but skyscrapers made of cold metal and inflexible glass. There were so many metal and glass structures reaching up like pitiful children trying to play god by touching the sky. But it didn't make them feel detached. Not really. Or not for the reasons everyone suspected, at least.

Romanov once suggested to Bruce that what they felt was a loss of identity brought on by switching sides. At some point, Romanov explained, it becomes impossible to understand yourself outside the constraints of who you are expected to be. This was true for all organizations that expected you to dedicate your life to them; it was true of Hydra, it was true of SHIELD, and if they were going to be honest with themselves, it was true of the Avengers as well. So when Pietro and Wanda first stepped through the door Hydra had opened for them, they had left their old selves behind and become someone new, some _thing_ new. They were not the Maximoffs anymore, they could not be. Instead they were the twins, Hydra’s Twins. They would have had to hide themselves away behind the facade of being _The Twins_. Their wants and desires, the things that made them Pietro and Wanda, they could not exist inside Hydra. She should know, she had reminded Bruce. Dr. Banner hadn’t needed the reminder.

No longer in Hydra’s hold, _The Twins_ could go back to being Maximoffs, could go back to being Wanda and Pietro. If they could remember who those people were. Romanov thought that the distance the Maximoffs kept from the others, the ever present disdain in their glances, was a result of the Maximoffs not knowing who they were. Keeping distant because it meant they could keep safe. Letting someone get close would mean letting someone know the truth; they didn’t even know themselves anymore. That was Romanov’s understanding of what the twins felt. But even that was not the truth of it. Not really.

Wanda relayed all of the Avengers’ suspicions and understandings to Pietro late at night in the comfort of the rooms they shared. They would stay up late, murmuring in Sokovian to each other in ways that felt like being home. Together they would roll their eyes and scoff at the presumptions of the other Avengers.

“Who are they to presume to know us so?” Pietro would demand petulantly in English after Wanda had explained the latest musings of the other Avengers. It was surprising how often the others mulled over repetitive thoughts in order to explain the Maximoffs’ behavior.

Secretly Wanda would be impressed that Pietro even knew the meaning of the word _presume_ but an intimate understanding of his ego would prevent her from commenting on this. Instead she would answer him in Sokovian, ignoring his use of English no matter how impressive.

“They must make excuses for our behavior. They cannot understand us if they do not make excuses.” The words would roll of her tongue easily every night. She understood why the others acted as they did, thought as they did. Pietro did not; perhaps he never would. For all his speed, he was often slow to grasp what he did not want to understand. Quick, but stubborn. And stubbornness always won out in his mind.

“Why must they understand us at all?” Pietro would demand, still petulant.

And Wanda would shake her head but remain silent, because some things could not be taught to people who are unwilling to learn.

So the Maximoffs continued to know their true reasons for loathing everything about Stark Tower, including the people in it, and the rest of the Avengers continued to be blissfully unaware. This lasted for weeks, for months, until it became less than blissful to be unaware. Eventually the Avengers lost their understanding natures. One by one support for the Maximoffs' behavior dropped off as more and more of the Avengers grew tired of being on the receiving end of Wanda’s bored gaze or Pietro’s damned near violent glances. Stark was, surprisingly, not the first to grow tired of the Maximoffs' petulant and dismissive behavior toward him. Instead it was the star spangled soldier, Steve Rogers. And once the captain of the team made it known that their behavior was unacceptable, the others were quick to fall in line.

Rogers believed he could understand the Maximoffs the most. He believed that being displaced decades was comparable to being displaced culturally. He also believed that he knew what it was like to willfully choose to undergo experiments for the purpose of protecting the little guys, the guys who could not protect themselves. And while he thought their conclusions to be misplaced, he believed that their reasons for wanting to fight Stark - to protect the Sokovians who could not protect themselves - were similar to his own reasons for wanting to fight in the last World War. He even believed his own experience with the super soldier serum was comparable to whatever had made the Maximoffs into the more-than-average people they were now. He took these beliefs with him every time he tried to relate to the Maximoffs, every time he tried to offer penance to Wanda for giving everyone on his team waking nightmares that left lasting impressions even months later, and every time he tried to offer solace to Pietro who had lost so much of himself that day more than a decade ago when a bomb had taken everything from him but his sister. It was perhaps these beliefs that made him cave quicker than the others. 

That, or the fact that his beliefs were promptly thrown back in his face every time he tried to interact with the Maximoffs in any way. He almost grew bitter of their dismissive responses, their unimpressed gazes, the disdainful press of their lips and furrow of their brows as they listened to his words with cold, unimpressed eyes. 

So one day he drew a line in the sand and decided that the Maximoffs could either stay on one side of that line, or cross it. And the Maximoffs, who were well known for being trouble even at a young age, crossed it. They refused to accept every olive branch he had offered, they practically spat upon any attempt at understanding them he made. And so he stopped offering olive branches, stopped attempting to understand them, and decided that they had received more than enough time and understanding from the rest of the Avengers. They needed to accept that they were now a part of the team, that they now resided in the Avengers Tower. They needed to let go of all of their past biases and opinions and move forward with their lives. And they needed to do it _now_.

When Wanda stumbled across that particularly surprising thought in Rogers’ mind, she almost stumbled in real life. Even mind readers can be shocked by the directions a well-known mind can wander toward. That night she told Pietro of what she had overheard the star spangled soldier thinking. Pietro’s only response was the same scoff and eye-roll he had given to all of her previous nightly announcements. Wanda wanted to roll her eyes as well, but something in her had changed at the loss of Rogers’s support. It was true that none of the other Avengers understood what she and Pietro were experiencing, but she now wondered whose shoulders needed to bear the burden of that fault.

Because regardless of how little the rest of the Avengers knew, Wanda and Pietro were not so clueless. They understood their own emotions perfectly. They knew exactly what they hated about Stark Tower. It was what they had always hated about Stark: extravagance.

Extravagance and greed were twins birthed from the same evil mother: _destruction_. Greed had destroyed everything the Maximoffs' had held dear; their mother, their father, their home, all of it gone in an instant because one man desired what another man had. All of it gone because one man wanted to drape his windows with gold spun into threads and woven into fabrics. All of it gone because one man wanted to pluck stars from the evening sky and hang them from his wife’s ears and neck and fingers. All of it gone because one man paid for one bomb that he expected to magically transform the lives of others into millions of little green pieces of paper.

Stark Tower dripped with the blood of every life lost to bombs and bullets and the bribes made to get them. A single painting from one wall of Stark Tower could feed thousands of gaping, begging, _wailing_ mouths for a month, maybe longer. Stark Tower was everything Wanda and Pietro had protested against for months, no, for _years_. 

In their minds, even before they had ever seen it, Stark Tower had epitomized everything they had fought against, had rallied against, had taken beatings for protesting. It personified everything they despised in the world, everything they were working to change. And then Ultron attacked, and Wanda had decided she would be an Avenger, and everything changed.

Being an Avenger meant living in the Avengers Tower. And when the Maximoffs arrived their worst fears were met, Avengers Tower was really just Stark Tower with a few new layers of paint. It was everything that was wrong with the world, and they were now a part of it.

So of course they walked everywhere with hate in their eyes, with disgust on their faces and in their words and seeping out of every pore. Of course they held disdain for their new place of living and the people they lived with. And of course they couldn’t tell the other Avengers this. Of course they let them think it was culture shock, it was side-switching shock, it was the shock of getting over being brain-washed. Of course they did.

How could they do anything else?

Even when Steve Rogers himself openly informed them he would no longer tolerate their behavior. Even when Agent Barton and Stark made sassy remarks about their volatile temperaments and seeming inability to be team players. Even when Dr. Banner suggested that they leave if they were so unwilling to even _attempt_ to relate to the others. And finally, when the last Avenger present _finally_ gave up on their “adjustment period,” when Agent Romanov herself stood silently before them, giving them a thorough look-over that lasted minutes before shaking her head and walking away without a word, even then they couldn’t tell the other Avengers that they didn’t understand what they Maximoffs felt.

And so the atmosphere grew much _much_ tenser inside Stark Tower, while the majority of the Avengers attempted to show the Maximoffs just how much they disapproved of their rude behavior.

Still the Maximoffs kept their distance, they kept the discontent, the disgust. They kept it all wrapped around them like an ever present judgmental shield that kept the others at more than arm’s length. And they thought they were alone in this deep seated anger with Stark Tower, rooted deep in the cores of their beings, until one day they heard the truth in the undertones of Darcy Lewis’s ever-present bored drawl.

“Man, this place blows.”

With four simple words, Pietro’s understanding of this new world around him and his place in it crashed down around his ears. But even he - he who would boast of being able to see the most minute shifting of a hummingbird's rapidly beating wings in the millisecond that it happened, he who would boast of seeing every detail of anything that ever happened, he who would boast of knowing everything before anyone else - even he would not understand that he was standing in the remains of his own crumbled towers until a much later date.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there's chapter one!
> 
> So this chapter was more or less written from the perspectives of Wanda and Pietro. The story will remain written in third person, but the chapters will probably lean more heavily towards one character's perspective. I think the next chapter will be written from Darcy's perspective. 
> 
> Sorry that it's such a slow start, I really want this story to focus more on the psychology of Pietro and Darcy (and definitely on the other Avengers as well) and how they cope with the new world they're living in. Of course there will be a relationship, but I want it to be a healthy thing where they don't lose themselves in it and where they still have their own thoughts and feelings and struggles. I want them to be strong independent of each other, because it makes them being strong when together so much more poignant.
> 
> Thanks for reading so far!! Feedback and criticism is really helpful and appreciated! :)


	2. The Sheer Audacity of it All

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”_

When Darcy Lewis was working on her bachelor’s degree, she only thought of two things: food, and money. Well, she also thought a lot about how cute the TA’s ass was in her Contemporary French Politics course - honestly she couldn’t remember a word he said, but she could definitely recreate the precise curve of his butt meeting his left thigh if given enough playdough. But mostly she just thought of food and money. A girl’s gotta eat, and a girl’s gotta be able to afford eating. 

These two thoughts were what led her to apply for the research assistant position of a then-unknown scientist - Jane Foster. Darcy never really thought much about what she was applying for; Jane did something with the atmosphere and stars, and everything that had to do with space was astrology to Darcy. Later she would learn that she hadn’t even gotten _that_ right: astro _nomy_ was the study of stars and space, astro _logy_ was what people who were cracked in the head thought the stars were telling them. 

But Darcy didn’t really care about the proper names for space sciences then. All she cared about was stacking up enough cash to allow her to eat more than ramen during her senior year of college coursework. Because let’s face it, her senior thesis would be mainly about her hot French Politics TA’s _ass_ if all she had to fuel her brain was twenty-five cent ramen and the knock-off pop-tarts you could buy in bulk at Costco. No one could really expect there to be enough nutrients in ramen and pop-tarts to inspire thesis appropriate creativity.

So she applied for the intern position with Jane. She applied for intern positions with a _lot_ of people and companies, if her ego allowed her to be honest. Jane hadn’t been her first choice; she hadn’t even been in Darcy’s top ten! Honestly, by the time Darcy sent in an application to Jane Foster, she was mostly just forwarding her resume to any research position that would pay. She hadn’t even really looked at what the position required her to do. This definitely helped to explain why a political science major wound up with a position demanding quantum physical knowledge and expertise. Or maybe it was astrophysical knowledge and expertise. To be honest, years later and Darcy _still_ couldn’t tell the two apart. 

What it _didn’t_ help explain is how Darcy had to send her application to the _one_ position that probably wasn’t boring as hell. It was actually a lot more exciting than she had ever wanted. What Darcy wanted was a simple internship to put on her resume when she applied to graduate programs, and money in the bank for when she wanted to do what all humans do… _eat_. What Darcy wanted was to look at super detailed notes taken in hasty, terrible PhD owner chicken scratch writing, transcribe it into a word document on a computer, maybe correlate some data, do a few necessary google searches for whoever it was she was interning with _at most_ , and call it a day. Darcy had actually _wanted_ boring! She had wanted easy, mindless, brain dead, redundant drone work. She had _expected_ it.

What she hadn’t expected was that a drop-dead-gorgeous _god_ would come falling out of the sky and get hit with her boss’s car….twice. But that was all it took to change her life forever. Now, years later, she had a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and the same undergrad job she had taken to afford eating more than ramen. Except this wasn’t where she was supposed to be!

She was supposed to be in Europe, studying at some average university, working on a master’s degree that would pave the way for her probably-not-world-changing research! She was supposed to be studying the effects of the United States on Middle Eastern politics. Or the relationship between Asia and South America. She was supposed to be writing papers that compared oil to the blood diamonds of Africa. She was supposed to be starving, poor, working for some non-profit because it looked good on paper but also because it would help with her articles comparing oil to blood diamonds, and surrounded by a hundred other kids who were just as disenchanted with the world as she was and just as incapable of doing anything to fix the problems, no matter how much they wrote papers saying they could.

Instead she was in New York City, eating the most delicious pad thai she had ever sampled, working for a scientist who was so crazy she was actually _right_ about her crazy thoughts, and surrounded by overpowered babysitters. _Attractive_ overpowered babysitters, but still babysitters nonetheless. Darcy wasn’t sure how many people would complain about having to live in the lap of luxury and being forced to eat five-star cuisine every day while getting paid to do absolutely nothing. But then, Darcy wasn’t really like most people to begin with.

She imagined she could actually like living in the Avengers Tower, under the right circumstances. It was well decorated, well furnished, and the fridge was always stocked. Not to mention the eye candy that waltzed around twenty-four hours a day was on point. Sometimes Darcy wondered if being attractive was a prerequisite for being an Avenger; were the ugly super-humans just overlooked and locked in a cage somewhere? Even Dr. B. had a good thing going with the whole self-depreciating, nerdy scientist vibe he rocked. He sort of had the hot dad thing going for him. And super hot super-humans aside, having an actually intelligent AI who you could interact with on a fairly personal level meant that Darcy never had to feel lonely when she was, well, alone in her rooms, or in any room. She could just talk to Jarvis. Though if she had to be honest with herself, she would admit that it was a little creepy talking to a bodiless AI system that shared a voice with an AI system that _definitely_ had a body. A _nice_ body. If she had a little more courage she might even try talking to the Vision instead of his bodiless counterpart. 

So if the circumstances were different, and Darcy made a pro and con list of living in Avengers Tower, the pro list would probably outweigh the cons. I mean, the frequent visits from Thor, God of Thunderlicious biceps and thighs, alone would be enough to tip the pro scales into a victory position, no matter how many cons there were. But the circumstances _weren’t_ different. 

And the circumstances, as they stood, were this: Darcy Lewis made some bad life decisions and interned with an astrophysicist who now worked on top secret sciencey things that could get her killed. Said astrophysicist was also the main squeeze of a friggin _Norse God_ who made no attempt to hide who his passions resided with, which could _also_ get said scientist killed. Darcy, as the intern to said astrophysicist who had a list of things working against her ability to remain alive, was also a marked target. And marked targets needed babysitters, according to SHIELD and the people in power who mattered.

And babysitters meant that Darcy Lewis had to put her entire life on hold. She was very confused by the whole concept because, from what she remembered of her childhood years, typically the babysitters came to _you_ , you didn’t have to go to _them_. But somehow Darcy had been roped into following Jane around like a lost puppy, and Jane went _to_ the babysitters, so that meant Darcy had to as well. Looking back, she wasn’t entirely sure how “roped into” it she had been, unless by “roped” you meant bound and restrained in ropes and carried away against your will.

“But I don’t understand how this relates to me at all.” Darcy had tried to argue, she had even raised her voice a few octaves above its usual bored tone, as a sign of how much she protested the decisions being made about her life, “Jane’s the one with brains bigger than her tits. Sorry, Jane.” she had added as an aside, noting the way the scientist’s perfect eyebrows drew together at the comment, “But seriously. Jane has the brains. I just write stuff down. Stare at excel spreadsheets. Sometimes I glue all the sheets of paper together to make pretty pictures of the night sky.”

“Ms. Lewis this is not a matter that is up for debate.” Agent Coulson, no, _Director_ Coulson, had been just as intimidating then as he had been the first time she met him. Back then he had been taking Jane’s life away and packing it up in a single black van. Now he was taking her life away. She had even glanced behind him to see if there was a black van waiting to ship her off to god knows where. “Ms. Foster has allowed you to work closely beside her for _years_ on projects SHIELD has classified as highly confidential. Most of my top agents don’t even know her projects exist. _You_ do. That puts you at a higher risk to the security of this nation, and this _world_ , than my top agents. And you don’t have even a quarter of their training.”

“So does that mean you want to train me?” Darcy had meant it as a sarcastic comment, and it certainly came across that way, but she would be lying if she said there wasn’t the smallest part of her that wished the answer had been different.

“No. You don’t need to be trained, Ms. Lewis. You need to be watched.” Coulson’s tone was so direct, so definitive that Darcy knew her future had been discussed in detail behind her back and the results of their findings had been less than impressive. “It’s only temporary. Only until all the hype of having a Norse God running around has died down. Then Jane won’t be such a target, and you won’t be a target just by associating with her. By the time Thor’s old news, the Avengers will be too, and SHIELD, if everything goes as planned. And then you can go on doing whatever it is you had planned for your life.”

Darcy had known that she didn’t have the backbone to argue with someone in such a spiffy suit who looked so serious and important. She had also known that she didn’t have the backbone to argue with someone who had been stabbed through the heart and somehow miraculously come back to life. Maybe that was why they decided she couldn’t have SHIELD agent training. 

But even without a backbone Darcy had tried her one last attempt at freedom.

“So if it’s only temporary, assign someone to follow me. I know you’ve got a million brainiacs in your organization, they could easily pose as college students, come with me to Europe.” Even she could hear the desperate tones in her voice. The bored drawl was nowhere to be found, every trace decimated as she watch her future slip between her fingers like so much sand.

Director Coulson had offered her a sympathetic smile, and her world came crashing down around her ears before the words had even left his lips. “I’m sorry.”

Darcy was good at pretending things didn’t bother her. She was a master of the blasé attitude. She hadn’t said a word about how much she disapproved of Director Coulson’s decision since that discussion. And that discussion had happened months ago. 

A lot had happened in those past months. She had bought all of the newspapers she could find within a two-block radius, wrapped up all of her knick-knacks in said newspaper, and packed them away in more boxes than she could count. She had a lot more in her possession than a twenty-three year old who was always travelling should have accumulated, really. She hadn’t expected that it would take so many vehicles to move all of her belongings from her apartment. In end she had been right to expect a black van to come and take away all of her life. Only it had taken more than one van - she may have been a little proud of how many SHIELD vans they had needed to call in to haul off her belongings to Avengers Tower. She may also have been a little proud of the wide eyed looks Tony Stark had given her as man after man trecked through his living room on their way to her assortment of personal rooms.

“You know I _did_ leave you fully furnished rooms?” Stark had asked in what Darcy had detected to be disbelieving tones.

“Yeah but I have a feeling you don’t really know what’s _in_ with the kids nowadays, Gramps.” Darcy had snarked back. She imagined she wouldn’t have had the audacity to sass _the_ Tony Stark in his own home if this had been the first time they interacted. Luckily for her, Jane Foster, scientist extraordinaire, had hooked her up with multiple encounters with the genius billionaire previously, so she was on her a-game.

Tony, for his part, turned slack jawed to a bemused looking Pepper. “Did she just accuse me of being uncool?” he had demanded when Darcy was out of earshot, his eyebrows raised so high from the sheer shock to his ego that they were hidden beneath his unkempt bangs, “You know what’s _in_ with the kids, right now? _Me!_ _I’m_ in the with the kids! Iron Man is all the kids talk about nowadays!”

Pepper had managed to keep the laughter trapped in her chest, for the sake of Tony’s poor ego, but the incredibly amused smile had been impossible to hold back. “I know, Tony, I know.” she had soothed, shaking her head at how sensitive a man who thought himself indestructible could be.

“And _Gramps_? Do you know who Gramps is? Gramps is the star-spangled pretty boy who is _actually old enough_ to be a grandfather! Did she just call me Gramps?” Tony Stark would not be forgetting the day Darcy Lewis moved into Avengers Tower for quite some time, no matter how much his ego wanted him to.

Now here she was, living with more people than she had in her college days. Even when she was so starving that she had applied to be an intern for an astrophysicist Darcy hadn’t stooped so low as to live with more than three other people! And now, now she lived in a building that permanently housed more super-humans than Darcy could count on one hand. Not to mention the fact that the lower levels of the tower retained their function as Stark Industries offices and laboratories and not even the Norse gods knew how many people were working down there day and night. Darcy would know that the Norse gods were just as clueless as she was, she had asked a few. Or, well, she had asked _one_ , but that was more than enough for her. She had also taken mental note that Norse gods were not to be confused with biblical gods; biblical gods were all knowing and all seeing and Norse gods clearly weren’t, as was evidenced by Thor’s lack of knowledge about how many people Tony employed in the lower levels of the Avengers Tower. But all that aside, Darcy was sure it wasn’t being entirely dishonest to say that she was basically living with more than a hundred people - if she included Stark Industries employees. 

And she had never felt more alone. Not even talking to Jarvis late at night could make the full ache of loneliness disappear, though she tried telling herself otherwise.

Sometimes she felt like going to Jane, to talk to her about...well… _anything_ really. But most of the time she decided that was a bad idea. She had tried to talk to Jane one time, right after they had both moved into the Avengers Tower and were in the process of trying to settle in. 

“I don’t understand,” Jane’s brows had drawn so closely together on her forehead it almost looked like she had a unibrow, “It’s not like anything really changed, Darce, just the location. And honestly, these rooms are a huge step up from your apartment, no offense.”

“What do you mean nothing’s changed, Jane?” Darcy had groaned, pressing her face into a rather fluffy down pillow and taking a deep breath through the fabric before yanking the pillow away from her face and continuing on, “You mean nothing’s changed for you? You still get to be in your super shiny labs working with super shiny sciencey stuff for your super shiny SHIELD projects. What about _me_? I have a degree in political science for christ’s sake! What am I supposed to do with that here?”

“What about you? Darcy, you graduated from college over a year ago and you’ve been working with me since then. You were working for me for years even before you graduated. It’s not like you working for me now is somehow new. SHIELD didn’t _make_ you do this.” Jane had argued. “And my SHIELD projects have nothing to do with light reflection, by the way.” she had added as an aside, correcting Darcy’s ways of explaining what she did out of habit.

Darcy had known then that there was no point in discussing the matter any further. That night after Jane had left her rooms, she had gathered up her collection of acceptance letters to master’s programs from universities all over Europe. She had taken them all down to one of the shared living rooms - the one with the fireplace - asked Jarvis to light a fire, and thrown them each into the flames, one by one. She watched them all catch fire, brighten for mere moments like the children of stars before charring and turning the darkest shade of black, disintegrating into millions of pieces so small they almost didn’t exist. She had done this four times. But when the last letter had been in her hand, she had held back. She burned them one by one, all except for one. 

She hadn’t told Jane all those months ago when she had applied to the universities. That had been before Thor had come back and spirited Jane away to the land of the Norse gods, wherever that was. That had been before the collapse of SHIELD, before Ultron, before everything that sealed her fate. She hadn’t told Jane when the first acceptance letter came back, or when the third came, or even when the first rejection letter had come to her. She hadn’t even told Jane when she had accepted one of the university’s offers - a partial scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in International Relations at a university in the Ukraine. She had meant to, really she had, she just didn’t know how to, and then Director Coulson had come and ruined everything.

So Jane had never known that Darcy had plans beyond running after her like an over-grown child, making sure she ate healthy-ish meals and slept when all the people who weren’t crazy scientists slept. Jane had never known that Darcy had dreams of her own, dreams that included advanced degrees and a different kind of research. Darcy had never really told anyone anything important. She was about to, that night when she and Jane had just moved, but then Jane had said, “I don’t understand,” and Darcy knew that even if she had explained everything, Jane still wouldn’t understand.

Because even though Jane could understand the stars and the sky and all kinds of crazy insane physics phenomena, even though she could understand the inner workings of a fricken _Norse God_ , she couldn’t really understand anything about the complexities that made up human beings. And sometimes, the fact that Jane didn’t understand human interaction past using someone as a sounding board for new and complicated ideas really upset Darcy. For a while Darcy had begun to suspect that Jane was really all she had. After Coulson’s relocation and supervision orders she knew it; Jane was _definitely_ all she had. And an AI named Jarvis understood human interaction more than Jane Foster.

Honestly, sometimes Darcy wondered if Jarvis understood human interaction more than _anyone_ in Avengers Tower. Tony and Dr. B. and Jane all got on well enough, but they didn’t really talk about anything but science with each other. And only speaking in a language foreign to everyone else around you did not count as human interaction. Then there were the agents, Sexy Thing One and Sexy Thing Two, who, as far as Darcy could tell, specialized in being drop dead gorgeous. They were about as talkative as Darcy expected SHIELD agents to be. That is to say that they really only talked when they had an ulterior motive. And as Darcy was clearly never involved in any of their ulterior motives they never really spoke to her at all. Not to mention Sexy Thing Two, the one with the bow, was missing way more frequently than seemed necessary. If Avengers Tower was _really_ Agent Pretty-Eyes’s permanent residence then Darcy secretly had two heads and three feet.

Captain Star-Spangled Underpants was good enough company, but he was always looking for something to fix, someone to save. And Darcy didn’t really need the kind of fixing and saving he was keen on doing. She hooked him up with the current slang whenever he was taking some downtime and he hooked her up with stories that made her entirely positive she would have never lasted as a woman in the 1940’s, but that was as far as their interactions went. She was basically a teacher for him, and he was basically a grandfather for her. No wonder Tony called him Gramps.

Thor was gone more often than not, which was probably a good thing because all Darcy could do when he was around was drool and make inappropriate comments. Jane was a good enough sport when these things occurred, but Darcy suspected that was only because Jane didn’t realize that Darcy was harboring a legitimate crush on her boss’s thunderlicious boyfriend. When Thor was slumming it with the humans, it was mainly because something had gone so wrong he was expected to work to fix it. And if he wasn’t fixing something, or breaking something, then he was with Jane. So, no human interaction opportunities there. And really, talking to Thor didn’t count as human interaction anyway. Asgardians weren't really human beings, after all.

Then there were the newest recruits, who Jarvis had trumped on her internal scale of “most capable of normal human interactions” weeks ago. As far as Darcy could tell, the Maximoff twins hated everything and everyone except for each other. Which she totally got. She was beginning to hate everything in Avengers Tower also. It was beginning to feel less like a vacation home and more like a prison, leaving her babysitters to feel more like prison guards than anything else. Sometimes she was surprised when she was allowed to walk out the front door without having to deal with the Spanish Inquisition demanding to know where she was going and when she would be back. Honestly, that had never happened, but three months later and she was still expecting it to. Maybe the Maximoffs felt the same way she did. She honestly had no clue what they felt, she hadn’t gotten more than a few words out of either of them. She suspected what they hated most was having to see Tony’s presence everywhere they looked - they had spent the better part of their lives protesting his company, they couldn’t be pleased about literally living _in_ it now - but she wasn’t really curious enough about them to ask.

Honestly, Darcy Lewis was more terrified of the Maximoff twins than she was of anyone else in the entire tower - and she lived with the freaking _Hulk_! But the Hulk knew he was dangerous, Dr. B. kept that guy on lockdown. The Maximoff twins? She wasn’t really sure what they could do beyond Wanda’s mind reading thing, but they had to have been pretty dangerous to get escorted onto Avengers Tower property against their will. And it was most definitely against their will, if their constant glares and aggravated body language were any indication.

The world must look at the Avengers Tower as a beacon of hope. Darcy imagined they all stared up at its peak and made up pretty stories about how happily all of the Avengers lived together in its shiny tower walls. She imagined average people told their children stories about how they were all one big happy family living in a super fancy mansion where everything was given to them on golden platters. She snorted to herself at the image; it _did_ line up with Tony’s flamboyant personality. She could definitely imagine him hiring too many servants to count to follow them around and offer them champagne and escargot from gold plated serving trays. He would probably do it just to silently boast about his billions of dollars if he wasn’t so worried about the super-humans damaging a wait-staff. She bet he had a swimming pool filled with gold coins and looted pirates’ treasures somewhere in this building. 

Gods, the sheer _audacity_ of it all! She could be in the Ukraine writing papers about Tony’s outrageous use of money _right now_ , instead of sitting here at this marble countertop, watching Saturday morning cartoons on her laptop and thinking about how stupid and wrong all of the rest of the people in the world were when they thought of what it was like to live in Avengers Tower. 

“Man, this place blows.” she said aloud, some small part of her secretly wishing someone would overhear. Let them hear! She was tired of not complaining! She was tired of putting her life on hold! It had been _months_ since she had been forced to move into Tony’s Tower for the Super-Powered, and she was starting to wonder when Coulson would consider the “Thor Hype” no longer...hype.

She hadn’t fully expected a response to her comment, mostly she had just wanted to say it out loud for once, to feel the way the words formed on her lips and tasted on her tongue. She hadn’t even really paid attention to who was in the room when she spoke. Typically it was just her and Jarvis nowadays anyway, everyone else was busy doing super-human stuff. But if she was being honest, any response she _had_ expected was in the verbal form. She definitely hadn’t expected to feel as if the very air around her had shifted and suddenly become heavier and hotter. She hadn’t expected to feel as if there were suddenly eyes watching her. And she certainly hadn’t expected to be met with two very intent gazes when she turned around.

The Maximoff twins must have entered the shared living room when she wasn’t paying attention - those Batman Beyond episodes could be really engrossing at times - but they certainly had her attention now. Neither spoke, but both had certainly heard her comment, and both were viewing her with those eyes that made her think they hated living here just as much as she did. The girl, Wanda, had a look in her eyes that was just distant enough to be a little disconcerting, as if she was trying to focus on Darcy but instead was seeing straight through her head. There was something about the quality of the look that put Darcy on edge, and she remembered what Jane had been babbling about when the Maximoffs moved into the tower - mind reading and the possibility of brainwaves sending off electrical currents that could be picked up and interpreted by super sensitive minds. Mind reading.

“Hey!” Darcy said suddenly, fully turning in her seat at the counter so she could fix the female Maximoff with her most serious stare. It was an expression she didn’t wear often and it almost pained her to wear it now. “I don’t know if you have any ground rules here, but my mind is definitely off limits! Common courtesy, jeeze.” 

Wanda’s eyes were quick to gain a more focussed quality, which Darcy took as a sign that she had immediately stopped invading her mind, and her head tilted to the side. Her expression was nowhere near the usual death-to-all-who-gaze-upon-me levels Darcy was so used to seeing and for a brief moment, Darcy wondered if they were about to have a civilized conversation. But then she made the mistake of glancing toward the other Maximoff present and all hope for potential normal human interaction vanished. 

Pietro Maximoff’s glare was so fierce she wondered for a brief second if his super power involved making things explode with his eyes. Or setting things on fire...he definitely looked like he could set something on fire right now. His entire body was tense, as if ready to spring into action, and she noted the way the fingers on his right hand twitched nervously where they rested on his leg. The look on his face was so angry she actually took a slow breath in to stabilize her heartbeat after it responded to the look the way it would have responded to a predatory threat in the wilderness. 

Darcy made a mental note to never ever speak to Pietro Maximoff unless there was a super-human present whom she could hide behind. And after taking a few seconds to wonder what could have possibly made him so angry, a glance at Wanda forced her to make a second mental note to never ever talk to Wanda when her brother was around, just in case she said something else that provoked this death glare. 

The seconds that stretched after her request for mental privacy seemed to last for minutes. Darcy wondered if the Maximoffs even spoke English when the silence actually did stretch on for a full minute. Wanda made no move to comment on Darcy’s accusation and Pietro made no move to release the tension from his body or the anger from his eyes and both twins’ responses left Darcy feeling more and more uncomfortable as the moments drifted by. So she did what any self-respecting political science major would do in this situation: she grabbed her laptop and tried to leave the room as calmly as she could. All poli. sci. majors knew how to pull out of a potential war zone quickly and efficiently, especially if it was almost guaranteed that they would be on the losing side of the battle. 

“Umm, you guys seem pretty busy with your…” her voice trailed off as she looked down at them sitting on the couch and drew a blank about what they could possibly be doing, “With your important twin stuff.” she finally settled for, backing slowly towards the doorless entryway, her laptop gripped tightly in her hands. “So I’m just going to, you know, leave you to it. Don’t want to interrupt anything. Bye.” And then she was gone, running from the room and the powerful blue-eyed glare that would probably haunt her nightmares for at least the rest of the week.

Darcy Lewis had no backbone. She had absolutely no problem admitting to herself that she was intimidated out of a living room that she had just as much a right to be in as he did by a single glare. The man had super powers, for god’s sake! Who knew what he could do? Maybe he turned into a junior version of the Hulk if his sister was threatened. And from what Darcy could tell, that man had just interpreted her comment as threatening his sister. She didn’t want to stick around to see what happened to average people who pissed off more-than-average people.

This place really did blow. Where else could she possibly feel as if her life was threatened after making a simple passing comment to request the privacy that she was pretty certain _everyone_ was entitled to? It should be a constitutional right: the right to not have mind readers snooping through your brain folds! And how was _this_ supposed to be any safer than whatever threats super spies like Director Coulson imagined were waiting for her out in the real world? Why did she have to put her life on hold just to be surrounded by _this_?

Sometimes there was nothing that Darcy hated more than her stomach. If it hadn’t been for her stomach, she wouldn’t be on lockdown in the loneliest tower in New York City with some of the most dangerous people in the world. After all, when Darcy Lewis had first applied for the position of Jane Foster’s intern, she had really only been thinking of food and money. And food and money had sealed her fate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there goes chapter two! Thank you so so soooo much for the amazing comments! And for all of the kudos and bookmarks! You guys made me smile so hardcore!
> 
> So this is the beginning of my exploration of Darcy. I tried to put myself in her shoes, imagining what it would be like to have worked towards a degree that becomes basically useless in her position in the Marvel universe. I think a lot of people write her off as silly and unintelligent, simply there for sarcastic entertainment, but I think she's actually brilliant and just hasn't had a chance to let her brilliance show because she's always expected to do science things, which she wasn't trained for at all. I want to give her a chance to show how brilliant she is in this story :)
> 
> I like to imagine that anyone who studies Political Science has a thorough understanding of economics on both a national and global level and also an understanding of the relationships between politics and economics. I also, in my naive little mind, like to imagine that anyone who has studied these things would see all of the corruption and wrong in the world and want to solve those problems. So Darcy has all of these characteristics that I imagine Poli.Sci. majors to have...and this is her coping with those characteristics.
> 
> Anyway, more Pietro development to occur in the next chapter...probably more Darcy/Pietro interactions, we'll see how it all plays out :) Thank you so much for reading! And please leave any comments and criticism you have for the story! It really helps :) Until next time...


	3. The Master Puppeteer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force."_

Wanda would silently scold him every opportunity that she found for the next few days. She had never needed words to show him her disapproval, even before she had gained her unique mental abilities. She could show him in other ways; in the way her shoulders would draw back and straighten a little more whenever he was looking at her, or the way the corners of her eyes would crinkle just the slightest bit and the line of her mouth would tighten with the words she held back. Pietro didn’t need the words to know when he was being scolded, not anymore. But sometimes he wished she would use them. It was easy for him to understand that he was being reprimanded, but the reasons behind the reprimanding were not always so obvious.

After all, it was Wanda Maximoff who was the mind reader, not Pietro. 

In the past he could tell her this when she would rely on her methods of silently reproaching his actions to get her point across. “Wanda, I am not a mind reader! You must tell me what I have done wrong!” 

Words used to be so much simpler then, they didn’t carry the weight of the truth that they now held. Then they carried simpler truths; no one could read minds, so how could he be expected to? He was not special. 

Now the same words meant something different. Something deeper and darker. And so he kept them to himself and wondered secretly if she still heard them.

Whether she heard them or not would probably always remain a mystery to him. He thoroughly doubted she would actually tell him what he had done wrong even if she _did_ hear him silently asking in his head. So instead he settled for sending her curious glances whenever he sensed her silent disapproval. Instead he murmured quiet questions against the side of her head late at night when they sat close together and shared the events of their day. She met his curious glances with the cold looks she usually reserved for the other Avengers and shook her head at his more subtle questions, unwilling to explain what he either already knew or needed to learn on his own. If any of the Avengers noticed the new coldness Wanda showed her brother, none of them mentioned it.

Eventually Pietro gave up trying to make amends for some unknown transgression. By the end of the week Wanda must have decided he had served his penance long enough because her eyes became infinitely warmer when they met his and her shoulders stopped being drawn back so rigidly whenever he glanced at her. She knew that he wondered what he had done, knew that he hadn’t figured it out, _yet_. But she was also learning to trust the paths in life that no one else seemed to see, she was learning to trust the way that people’s thoughts and decisions shaped entire worlds and universes. And so she trusted that one day Pietro would understand what he had done, without her explanation.

What he had done had probably seemed a small matter to any other witness. He merely glared at a girl who thought too little of her words and too much of a past she could not change. But Wanda was not any other witness; Wanda could see the strings that connected thought to action and action to reaction. She understood cause and effect on the most intimate of levels. She had seen the consequences of thoughts not yet even birthed. She had witnessed the effects of the thoughts of the past hundred years reaching out and touching the events of the next thousand years that had yet to come! And in the moment four simple words slipped past the Lewis girl’s painted lips, Wanda Maximoff had seen the most miniscule fragment of a future that could grow to be everything, or shatter into a million pieces that were never known by anyone.

And her stubborn brother, who was so quick to see everything but so slow to learn, was the hand that could form the heated glass into a work of wonder or shatter it before anyone could ever see what had been created. She was sure of it. 

This was why she found herself searching for the Lewis girl days after her brother had scared her away. She hadn’t wanted to speak to her, not really, only to see her, truly _see_ her, in ways only Wanda could see. So she waited until Pietro was preoccupied with his latest obsession: taunting Agent Barton while avoiding every arrow sent flying in his direction. The two had grown so competitive Wanda was beginning to wonder if it would end in a fatal injury. Thankfully Barton, for his part, kept his most dangerous arrows stowed, using only the typical barbed-at-the-end arrows against Pietro and his taunts.

“Do you know how hard is to make those suckers?” Barton had demanded when Pietro asked where all of his fancy arrows were hiding. And by _fancy arrows_ he had meant the ones that expelled knock-out gas or other, much less pleasant, surprises. “They don’t come from some second hand online store, pal. Hand made, each and every one. They’re not worth wasting on an arrogant kid like you.”

Pietro had responded with an insult so jarring it had felt like a physical assault on Wanda’s ears. Luckily, Pietro spoke Sokovian and it appeared the man with a bow did not. Or else Wanda had been fairly certain he wouldn’t have minded wasting a few arrows on her reckless brother.

Wanda often found it difficult to watch when Pietro and Agent Barton’s matches became a little too heated so it was not unusual for her to leave her brother in the agent’s capable hands for a few hours. It wasn’t even unusual for her to be found wandering through the many levels of the tower, stopping occasionally to stare absently down an empty hallway or at a spot on a nearby wall. Honestly most of the others just thought she had a few unique habits, some of which included staring off into space for long stretches of time. Hardly any of the Avengers suspected she was attempting to read minds whenever she was gazing off into the distance. They didn't think she had the audacity to do something so invasive in such an open and obvious way. When she thought about it, she decided that hiding in plain sight was really the best method anyone could adopt to defeat the Avengers.

So when Rogers passed by her on his way to his rooms and saw her standing completely still in the middle of the hallway, eyes focused toward the window opposite her, he thought absolutely nothing of it. He merely offered her a polite if distant greeting and continued on, slipping through his unlocked door with the grace of a man much smaller than he was. 

The fact that the star-spangled soldier shared a floor with Darcy Lewis never crossed his mind. Why would it? The Maximoffs had never taken an interest in _anyone_ before, much less someone as insignificant as Dr. Foster’s intern. Sometimes Wanda thought the Avengers were _too_ lax in their security. If the Maximoffs had wanted to tear this entire tower down, they could do it. Right in front of every Avenger. And the Avengers wouldn’t even think to stop them until it was too late. Knowing the Avengers’ thoughts so intimately meant Wanda knew this with complete certainty. It was one of the few things that comforted her at night when living in Stark Tower became too close to unbearable. Perhaps in the past she and Pietro had been helpless to stop the corrupt companies that held all the power in Sokovia. But now? Now the Maximoffs held the power. And she knew it.

What she _didn’t_ know was who Darcy Lewis was, and she intended to change that. It only took an hour or so to locate the girl who spoke without thinking. Locating the girl was potentially the hardest part. Once outside the hallway that led to her rooms it only took Wanda a few moments to close her eyes and concentrate, find that one strand of thought that would lead to all the others. 

And then she was drowning, losing her breath and losing her life in the mind of another. It was always like this when she tried to look past a person’s surface thoughts. To understand another you must first forget yourself. Searching through someone else’s mind, it was like trading souls; Wanda was forced to give hers up every time she wanted access to another’s. One thought for another, one mind for another, one soul for another. 

Images fled past her faster than she could comprehend them. This was also how it always was; she could not control what she learned from another person, not really. When she sought for the soul she found only the memories they clung to most desperately, the thoughts they held close to the heart, like beloved secrets. 

Darcy’s thoughts were like jagged spears as they struck Wanda, hitting deep and lodging in ways that made them nearly impossible to remove. Wanda heard them as they hit, angry words lashing out - oil wars spilling more blood than the Holocaust, genocides swept under the rug, drug cartels funded by corrupt governments, everyone helpless, everyone caged, no one saving the people who needed it most, superheroes fighting battles that corruption started, governments vying for the right to own the people who weren’t supposed to be owned by anyone. It was a painful mind to dive into and Wanda wondered where the warm thoughts of childhood were hiding. 

In comparison to the weaponized anguish of her thoughts, Darcy’s memories were all vague and blurry, only the more recent ones had enough shape and color to form images Wanda could understand. She saw young adults at desks, hunched over little blue covered booklets that they were scribbling furiously in, she saw the God of Thunder in a short hospital gown, she saw the God’s mortal fling unconscious and leaning over a cheap wooden table, she saw men in black suits who drove black vans and more boxes than she could count piled around her, she saw large white envelopes with the names of important looking institutions written on them, and at the end she saw a brightly burning fire and the charcoal and ashes that remained long after the flames had burned out.

In the moments it took Wanda to come back to herself, to release all of the bits of the other soul that weren’t her own, she fully understood the fragment of a future she had seen. And her heart ached with a weight she was not prepared for while simultaneously lifting away all of her worries as if it were made of nothing more than air. The contradiction between the unadulterated joy and anguish she felt brought her back fully to herself and she wondered how long she had been standing in the hallway outside Darcy Lewis’s rooms. She imagined she had been standing there long enough and turned abruptly on the balls of her feet before wandering off to find her brother. She would not tell him anything of what she had seen in Darcy Lewis’s mind, but the newfound knowledge she held in her own mind would be her sole consideration for the next few days.

She had wanted to see Darcy Lewis, and seen her she had. 

* * *

“Do you really think we are the only two people in all of Stark Tower to be so discontent?” Wanda asked Pietro a few days later.

They were sitting in the same shared living room Pietro had scared Darcy out of just a week earlier. Wanda had chosen the location for a reason, pulling all of the right strings tied to all of the right thoughts - the perfect puppeteer, executing precise movements for precise responses without the audience even knowing she was present. 

Pietro seemed shocked by her sudden question. She had never asked such a thing before. Sharing a disdain for the others in Stark Tower had offered them a sort of solace, it was a uniting force in this strange new country; admitting that anyone else could also share this disdain would surely not end well. His eyes left hers long enough to take in the vast room, so full of so many _things_ and yet so completely...empty. The statue of the naked man in the corner of the room looked as though it belonged in an Italian museum and Pietro briefly wondered if Stark had purchased it from a museum. The counter to the left of him was made of a single slab of marble, cut from a mountain and brought directly to this living room in its natural block-like state in order to be shaped to fit _perfectly_ in the room. The couch he and Wanda were lounging on was made of a high quality leather that felt almost like silk beneath his touch. 

“Discontent?” he asked, to buy himself more time to think.

“It means unhappy.” Wanda murmured, her eyes fixed in front of her, refusing to look at her brother.

Pietro nodded. “Could you have not just said ‘unhappy’ then?” he demanded. She was always trying to teach him things. It had annoyed him even when they were children, but now it was nearly intolerable with her new gifts. Now she would _always_ have something to teach him because she would _always_ have learned something no one else could possibly know. This was especially true for English words and grammar. He didn’t like this at all. It made him _discontent_.

Wanda pursed her lips but remained silent, allowing Pietro the time he needed to contemplate her words. He almost never needed time to answer her questions, he lived in a different world than she did. To him a mere second was comparable to the hours needed to completely work through a complex problem. In his world thoughts came at a normal pace and the rest of the people around him were simply thinking too slowly, speaking too slowly, acting too slowly. In her world, Pietro’s movements were quick and his thoughts were even quicker. Wanda often missed the things he thought because he thought them so rapidly and her mind could not keep up. But something about this question made him pause before answering, though she knew he had made his decision as soon as he understood the meaning of the word “discontent.” 

Pietro surveyed the room around them once more. Each individual object his eyes took in could be sold and the profits from that sale could be taken in order to solve drug ring problems in Sokovia or feed and house every starving orphan and widowed mother in all of Eastern Europe! And everyone who lived here simply took it all for granted. They walked past the statue without seeing it, slammed glasses down upon the custom made marble countertop so hard they often shattered, and collapsed dirty and sweating onto this couch that was made for gods among men. Did he think any of the others knew of the wasteful extravagance that they drowned in daily in this exorbitant tower? Did he think any of the others slept more poorly knowing that the sheets they wrapped around themselves at night were more expensive than the ones found in Buckingham Palace? No. No he didn’t.

“Of course we are the only two people, Wanda.” he finally answered, “Who else here has slept beneath the crumbling arch of a church door? Or been so hungry that they disgraced themselves by falling on both knees to beg food from people who were barely better off? Who else here has spent months planning rallies that went unnoticed by the people who could change anything? Who else, Wanda? Tell me!” His voice rose so many octaves that Wanda wondered if others would come to see what all the commotion was. It wouldn’t matter if they did, Pietro had lost his limited English in all of his anger and frustration and slipped into the only language he could truly express himself in, Sokovian.

“And this is the only way a person can be unhappy here? Only if they had first starved and slept on stone?” Wanda chose to continue using English. She didn’t like using Sokovian outside of their private rooms, it felt like sacrilege. Their language was the last thing that truly belonged to the Maximoffs and Wanda would not give it away to the Avengers so easily, she would not use it where any others could hear. It was for their ears alone.

“Yes.” Stubborn. Pietro was always so stubborn.

“What of the activists here? In this country?” she pressed him, “Many of them must go back home to beds at the end of the day. Many must still eat meals. And still they come together to protest the government’s actions: the wars, police cruelty, the treatment of the poor. What of them? Would they not be discontent in Stark Towers?”

Pietro did not always like being pressed. In fact, he rarely liked it. But when it was Wanda doing the pressing, Wanda trying to make him question himself, he tolerated it. “I think secretly each of them would be more than content here. It is the goal of every American, no? To one day own everything that everyone else wants. It is the, _vigoare a capitalismului de conducere_...how do you say it?”

Wanda took a moment to run through her rapidly increasing stores of English vocabulary before answering him. “The driving force of capitalism.”

“Yes, driving force of capitalism.” His tongue stumbled across the foreign words and his ‘ _r_ ’s and ‘ _i_ ’s came out in ways even he realized were wrong. “Activists here have dark hearts with deeply hidden secrets.”

“I don’t think you believe that.” Wanda murmured, finally looking straight into his eyes and challenging him at his very core. Before he could rise to the challenge she offered him another question. “Have you heard of what is happening in South America?”

Pietro sometimes liked the way Wanda would switch topics so rapidly, it made him feel as if someone else was living at the speed he lived. “No, Wanda. What is happening in South America?” He had already come to terms with the fact that he disliked American culture as a whole and Wanda was trying to make him change his mind. He didn’t know _why_ she was doing this, but he was beginning to learn that her reasons were always grounded in something important to her, so he was willing to let it all play itself out. There was nothing else to discuss about the matter of Stark Tower residents and American activists, Wanda would tell him why she cared whenever she was ready. 

And in the mean time, he was ready for this new topic.

Her eyes were still on his and the intensity behind the dark irises made him wonder what exactly his sister had been spending her free time thinking about and doing. “In South America there are drug cartels, like in Sokovia.”

“What do you mean, ‘like in Sokovia’?” Pietro asked, his eyebrows raised in dismissive disbelief, “Russia is also dipping her fingers into defenseless South American countries?”

“Yes and no. It is not Russia who is dipping fingers, but the United States. The drug cartels are very dangerous in South America, even the governments are scared of them.”

“So it is not _really_ like Sokovia.” he interrupted, always so impatient.

Wanda ignored the interruption and instead noted with satisfaction the way her brother turned his entire body to face her, giving her his full attention. He had even drawn his legs up onto the couch cushion in front of him. Despite his dismissive tone, he was clearly interested in what she had to say.

“Pietro, I said it was _like_ in Sokovia, not that it _was_ in Sokovia. Of course things are not exactly the same. Do not argue,” she held up a single finger to silence him as he opened his mouth, for once capable of being faster than her brother, “In South America, even though there are so many different countries, there are no borders between the drug cartels. They fight with each other, of course, but it is for territory that has nothing to do with country borders. Do you know that they are the number one cause of death in South America? And they attack small communities where everyone already has nothing to give. It is like living in a battle, every day, where soldiers attack anything that moves.”

“It is like Sokovia, you said this already.” But his eager eyes betrayed his disinterested words.

“The worst part I have not said. The South American drug cartels are not given drugs from Russia, not like Sokovian cartels. They grow and make most of their own drugs themselves, they do not need outside suppliers. Instead they need outside buyers. It is the people of the United States that create the market for the drug cartels.”

“Better the people of the States than the people of South America. Do they not already have enough hurting them in South America?”

“ _Pietro_.” Wanda’s voice was laced with tones that he immediately understood as dangerous. He had said an unacceptable thing, and he knew it. All human life was sacred, if it was not guilty of causing others to suffer. Not every American was guilty of causing the suffering of others. But he was stubborn and so he would not take it back. Wanda continued on anyway, her eyes flashing angrily at his comment even as she saw the reluctant guilt in his own, “It grows darker. The weapons the cartels own and use on innocent civilians? They are willfully given by the United States.”

Pietro’s eyes grew so hard and cold at this announcement that Wanda momentarily slipped back into memories of days long gone, when the Maximoffs were still just the Maximoffs, when a man named Strucker had introduced them to an organization called Hydra and had promised to help them destroy Tony Stark. Pietro’s eyes as he had first walked into the chamber where Hydra began their experiments were just cold and hard that day as they are in this moment. Wanda wonders momentarily if her own eyes had looked the same when she too joined Hydra, and then his voice shakes her from her contemplations.

“The United States does this so it can provide drugs to its people?” Pietro asked.

Wanda shook her head, her eyes never leaving her brother’s. “No. The drugs they sell are illegal here in this country. This is the worst part, Pietro. The United States sells weapons to the drug cartels so that they can keep all of the countries in South America disorganized, afraid of their neighboring countries, and afraid of their own people. It is for power,” she explains, though she knows that in his world he has already had enough time to put all of the pieces together, “If they can keep the countries disorganized, then they cannot unify enough to create a strong alliance between all of the countries in South America. The United States fears what an organized, allied group of countries in South America could do. It fears a stable infrastructure, stable economy, stable _everything_ in South America. And so it gives away its guns to the people it knows can destabilize the entire continent.”

There is a long moment of silence where Wanda imagines Pietro is trying to fill in all of the missing vocabulary in his mind. Words like “destabilize” and “infrastructure” are without a doubt new to him. His eyebrows draw very close together as he begins to understand more and more and his bright blue eyes show so much anxiety and pain and raw anger that she wouldn’t have to be a mind reader to know what he was thinking.

“Where did you learn all of this?” Pietro’s tone held all of the aspects of true interest and curiosity that Wanda had expected to hear.

And this was the moment Wanda had been waiting for. She finally looked away from him, her eyes focusing on the doorless entryway to the shared living room, a not-so-distant memory of a shocked girl running from her brother playing itself before her eyes. And the master puppeteer pulled on more invisible strings.

“From someone who is apparently not capable of being discontent.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER: NOT ALL OF THE SOUTH AMERICAN DRUG CARTEL STATEMENTS ARE ACCURATE AND THEY SHOULD NOT ALL BE TAKEN AS FACT! I AM BUILDING A _FICTIONAL_ WORLD HERE, some of it’s elaborated to fit my plot’s needs! That being said, a lot of it is actually true. Doing some research will probably blow your mind.
> 
> The language I decided to use as "Sokovian" is actually Romanian, which is spoken in Moldova and Romania. I looked at a map and imagined that Sokovia was a small country somewhere near the Ukraine, and Moldova seemed like the perfect fit for what I was imagining in terms of both size and location. So, if you’ve ever looked at a map of Eastern Europe, just imagine that Sokovia is hanging out right next to Moldova, under the Ukraine and above Romania. And they speak Sokovian, which is its own language, but I’m using Romanian because Sokovian obviously doesn’t exist.
> 
> Someone mentioned that this was a take on the Maximoffs that they hadn’t considered before, which is honestly why I started writing this story in the first place. I’ve read a lot of _fantastic_ stories about a lot of different aspects of the Twins coping with being Avengers, but none of them really explored the sheer culture shock that the Maximoffs would have to experience. Or the insane amounts of disenchantment that they would probably face after protesting capitalistic regimes for so long and then suddenly being drowned in a world that was the epitome of everything capitalism stands for.
> 
> So this story is my take on the Maximoffs adjustment period, and it focuses on how they deal with their ideologies coming to terms with capitalism and culture shock….with a little bit of Darcy/Pietro romance thrown into the mix because, let’s face it, they were probably made to be together.
> 
> Thanks again for reading this far! Let me know what you think so far! Sorry that there were no Darcy/Pietro interactions in this chapter, but I promise they're coming up! I'm just building up to it, I promise :)


	4. Anything Remotely Impressive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate."_

She wasn’t entirely sure how much free time the others in Avengers Tower had, but Darcy _was_ entirely sure that she couldn’t have had the most of it. She was pretty positive that she definitely had a lot more to do than at least some of them. Which was particularly odd for her to think about, considering she was probably the least skilled, least extraordinary, least unique person out of _everyone_ else here. How was it that the most expendable person in the tower could be busier than a freaking super-human who ran around saving the world whenever aliens or robots attacked? It seemed unfair.

Her seeming lack of free time made it all the more precious to her, which is why her decision to look up intro to kickboxing videos on youtube was a huge deal for her. Massive. She had been living in Avengers Tower for more than three months because Director I-Have-Scary-Black-Vans had decided that she wasn’t capable of defending herself. And instead of learning how to defend herself well enough to prove to Coulson that she didn’t need round the clock Avengers babysitters, she had spent every minute of her day doing the same thing she had been doing for the last three years. 

But doing the same thing she had been doing was what got her trapped in this stupid tower anyway! Running after Jane with steaming plates of food or loose pages of hastily scrawled notes had done nothing but make her entirely positive she wasn’t cut out for the hard sciences. Well, it may have also been the leading cause in her meeting a super sexy Norse god, but he turned out to have the hots for her boss anyway so little good that encounter did her. 

After her less-than-pleasant run-in with the Maximoff twins, or the Eastern Europeans from Hell as she was beginning to think of them, Darcy decided that something had to change. She wasn’t safe in the outside world because some invisible super bad guys were magically going to pounce on her no matter where she went - which made her just as much a super spy as Agents Sexy Thing One and Two, as far as she was concerned. And after her encounter with the scarier of the Maximoffs she wasn’t entirely sure she was safe in the Avengers Tower world either. Considering she could hardly lift a pile of plates without panting at the effort, she imagined she wouldn’t stand a chance against whatever it was the mind-reader’s brother could do. And she was beginning to wonder if maybe she _needed_ to be able to stand a chance. She couldn’t keep doing the same thing. Something had to change.

So one day Darcy used her limited free time to look up helpful youtube videos. Or at least, as she made her way down to one of the smaller gyms, precariously balancing her open laptop in one hand and a water bottle and towel in the other, she really _really_ hoped they would be helpful.

“Jarvis?” Darcy called out to the bodiless AI as she carefully set her laptop down and glanced around the empty space, “Are you sure this room is soundproofed?”

“All walls in the Avengers Tower's living quarters are lined with super insulating foam to ensure maximum auditory privacy in close quarter living situations.” Jarvis’s disembodied British accent floated gently through the roam.

Darcy took a moment to process all of the technical jargon before glancing around herself a second time, taking in the light blue of the walls and the large mirror that took up the entire wall opposite the door. 

“And you’re not just saying that to fuck with me?” she ensured, “This isn’t some new programming Tony installed: lie to Darcy so she humiliates herself version one point oh?”

“Mr. Stark has no such program in his database, nor any locatable records of plans for such a program.”

“Wonder when he’s gonna work on sarcasm detector technology.” Darcy muttered under her breath.

“No locatable records for such technological plans detected either.”

Darcy rolled her eyes. And _this_ was the epitome of human interaction for her. “Right,” she let the word leave her lips in long, drawn-out drawl, “Well, I’m gonna go close the door then. Can you lock it for me, Jarvis?”

She moved forward a few paces, her arm outstretched and her fingers pressing against the cold metal of the back of the door. She noted a few dents in the metal and wondered briefly who could have possibly hit the door hard enough to leave such marks - she imagined she would have known if Dr. B. had let the beast out of its cage and she couldn’t think of anyone else capable of denting such thick metal. Well, maybe Steve could. But she couldn’t imagine Captain Underpants angry enough to take a swing at an inanimate object. What exactly did the Avengers _do_ when they were locked away in these rooms for hours every day?

Shaking her head to clear it of the mental image of a bunch of big beefy dudes doing a strange combination of strength training and ballet, she pressed against the door with just enough force to gently close it. The resounding click and the slight vibration that she felt through her hand on the door assured her that Jarvis had indeed locked it for her.

“Thanks, J.” she muttered quietly.

“You’re quite welcome, Miss Lewis. Though I must ask why you feel it necessary to lock the door to a room that is considered shared space amongst everyone living in Avengers Tower.”

“Hey, if your all-knowing, super-genius, artificial intelligence can’t figure it out, I’m not going to explain it to you. Don’t you have learning capabilities? Look up humiliation and ego in that infinite database you have access to. Teach yourself something new. And don’t tell me the results!” she added as an afterthought, for once not at all curious about how Jarvis would respond to such a strange command.

“Yes, Miss Lewis.” is all he replied with.

If there was one thing that Darcy thought should be painfully obvious to the AI it was that she wasn’t like the others. She wasn’t as intelligent as Jane or Tony or Dr. B. She wasn’t as mysterious as the Eastern Europeans from hell. And she sure as hell wasn’t as capable of physical feats as basically everyone else she lived with. Why else would she carry and readily use a taser that could shoot people from a distance?

The very _last_ thing she wanted was for Captain Star-Spangled Underpants, or anyone else on the team, to wander by the gym and catch a glimpse of her fumbling with a punching bag, sweating more than an African marathon runner, and tripping over her feet every time her arms moved. The last thing she wanted was for Agent Sexy Thing One or Agent Sexy Thing Two to come over for an early afternoon workout and see her proving Coulson right - she _was_ completely incapable of defending herself. It was embarrassing enough to live with more-than-average humans who all had job titles like “Defender of the Planet” and “Nobel Prize Winning Scientist” when her own job title was, “unskilled research assistant.” The last thing she needed was for those more-than-average humans to realize she was also incapable of comparing to them in an athletic way. In a world that determined your worth by your brains or your brawn, Darcy Lewis was only average by both counts, and she was surrounded by much-more-than-average people. Having someone, _anyone_ , see her pathetic attempts at learning how to defend herself was the worst thing that could possibly happen to her at this point in her life.

So she picked the smallest gym in the building, waited until she was absolutely positive it was completely empty, and asked Jarvis to lock the door behind her. It was all very logical and reasonable, in her own opinion. Jarvis could certainly figure it out if given enough time and access to the right types of data. She thought he should check out personal blogs, maybe start with tumblr, but decided against mentioning it in the end. As far as she could tell their conversation was over for now, which meant she could finally take a look at that youtube video she had found. If she mentioned tumblr it would just start a whole new conversation, and Darcy was far too eager to start spending her free time in new ways to do that.

She wasn’t sure what she had expected from a video titled “intro to kickboxing,” but she definitely hadn’t been prepared for that hair! When exactly were mullets and white dude afros ever culturally acceptable? The 80’s? The 70’s? Great, she had found a 'get fit' tutorial from at least three decades ago. 

“Why is this even on youtube?” she muttered to herself, watching the man in spandex raise his arm up and make a totally over-the-top show of where he was putting his fingers as he made a fist. “Who watches stuff like this?”

And she was glad when the ever present - and ever eager to respond - Jarvis did not make some obvious remark like, “You do, Miss Lewis.” Though she did _love_ when he called her ‘Miss Lewis.’ 

In the end, Darcy decided that all men with mullets were assholes and douchebags, even back in the 80’s. It was entirely unfair that a person who believed that “a party in the back” was a legitimate thing could hit a punching bag for thirty minutes without ever breaking a sweat. It was also entirely unfair that said person had no instructions for what to do if you were as uncoordinated as a fish out of water and lost your balance every time you had to focus on your body turning one direction while your legs moved another. “Step forward, turn, jab, step back” was not enough instruction and no amount of terrible porno music playing in the background could change that fact! She was definitely grateful that she had confirmed the room’s soundproofing with Jarvis before she started playing the video because she really didn’t want _anyone_ overhearing the 80’s porn music, realizing that the door was locked, and then letting their imaginations wander as they contemplated what Darcy Lewis could possibly be doing under such circumstances. That would be worse than someone stumbling in and catching her in the act of attempting to punch this stupid fucking bag!

Also, no one had warned Darcy ahead of time that if you actually managed to hit the punching bag your knuckles would bruise. Even if you only hit it one time! And if you actually managed to hit the punching bag three times in a row, the skin on your knuckles would wear off. And if you continued to keep attempting to hit that stupid blue punching bag, your fingers would start to ache every time you moved them. And the aching would last for days.

No one warned her about that at all!

All things accounted for, at the end of the day Darcy Lewis decided that this was probably the very worst way she could have possibly decided to spend her precious free time. That was why it surprised even her when she decided to take her laptop down to the very same room the very next day. Jarvis must have come to some conclusion about his “ego and humiliation research” because he didn’t bother to ask her why she insisted on having the door to the small room locked this time around.

So Darcy spent the next hour and a half watching the same two idiots with the same terrible hair punch the same bag. It was only a thirty minute video. She followed along with it three times in a row. That was a lot of terrible 80’s porno music to take in at one time. That was how desperate she was to...honestly she wasn’t sure what it was exactly that she was so desperate to do. Was she just being rebellious? Did she just need to be doing something - _anything_ \- that didn’t involve helping Jane and looking at tons of data about space? Or was she honestly so disturbed by a single glare from a single man that she took drastic measures to ensure she could protect herself if he happened to go all Hulk Jr. on her? If that was what she was desperate to do then she could probably stop trying to hit a punching bag without falling over. After all, her favorite taser had taken out a fricken _Norse God_! She doubted that scrawny European could handle it any better than Thor had, super-human or not. 

So what _did_ she want? Why _was_ she down in this tiny room again, looking up at the punching bag from where she was laid flat out on the ground. Her fingers ached, her wrists felt swollen, and her arms were actually surprisingly exhausted. It had hurt just to hold them up in her terrible mockery of a fighter’s stance. She was trembling, her body was so exhausted after that hour and a half of repetitive jabbing motions. And the worst part was that the melody from one of the god awful 80’s porno songs that the video had used as background music was stuck in her head, playing in a repetitive loop that was more annoying than the first time her college roommate had discovered Garage Band on his macbook! What did she want from all of this? Did she really think following a thirty minute video titled “intro to kickboxing” was going to make her capable of doing anything remotely impressive?

And she supposed that was what she wanted. At the heart of it all Darcy Lewis just wanted to be impressive, just a little bit. Just enough to get Director I-Have-Scary-Black-Vans to remove his “you need to be watched” proclamation. Just enough to be able to live where she wanted to live. Just enough to give her the opportunity to go that stupid university in the Ukraine with the stupid master’s program where she could complain about corrupt governments with a bunch of other average students who also couldn’t get into any better programs. _That_ was what she wanted. And Darcy was often bad at making decisions that got her what she wanted, so it couldn’t really surprise anyone that she thought learning how to hit a punching bag from two guys with mullets and white dude afros would get her to the level of “impressive” she wanted to be at.

* * *

Three days later and Darcy found herself hunched over on a stool in Jane’s lab, immersed in an article about the industrial agribusiness corporations that were trying to take over farms in Ghana. Monsanto had its grubby fingers in every honey pot, as far as Darcy could tell, and the continent of Africa was one of the last remaining battlegrounds Monsanto had yet to drop its conquering bombs on. But it was definitely trying to.

“Ugh, I just read the most disgusting article about big business trying to take over small farms in Africa. They’re calling it a new wave of colonialism.” Darcy announced aloud to Jane when she had finished reading the article, her fingers already skimming across the keyboard to Google for more data about the new problem. 

Jane didn’t even bother looking up from whatever machine she was building, or fixing. It was always hard for Darcy to tell whether Jane was building something new or tearing apart a mistake in something old. “Why aren't you correlating the data I asked you for?” Jane demanded, her tone strangely impatient for a woman who hadn’t been bothered by her assistant for _at least_ an hour. Darcy had watched the clock.

Darcy rolled her eyes. Typical mad-scientist, couldn’t think about anything beyond her own research. “Data has been correlated. I posted up the results on your board of crazy - don't you ever look at thing anymore?” Darcy spared a glance away from her google search to see if Jane would answer with a nod or head shake. When she didn’t, Darcy continued, “That was hours ago anyway. Take a break, it's time to eat lunch somewhere in the world.”

“I'll wait until it's time for lunch here in America, thanks.” Jane muttered distractedly, still not taking her eyes off of whatever it was that only she could see.

“Well that was hours ago too.” sometimes it was really hard to maintain this facade of vague disinterest and boredom when you worked with someone who could be so exasperating, “Come on Jane, seriously, stop your super important science stuff for a minute and shove some super important food stuff in your face. And while you're at it, listen to me complain about how much this country sucks on a global level.”

Darcy watched Jane’s eyebrows furrow, but she also noticed that not even that announcement had managed to draw the scientist’s eyes away from her work. “Seriously? What time is it?”

“There’s a clock right behind you, genius. Look for yourself.” And Darcy added an eye roll for effect, even though she knew Jane wouldn’t see it.

“Jarvis?” Jane called out, she had learned long ago that whether or not Darcy’s official title was research assistant or intern, if the girl had refused to offer assistance once she wouldn’t change her mind when asked to perform the task again, “What time is it?”

“The current time in New York City is three twenty-seven and thirty-three seconds in the afternoon, Dr. Foster.” Jarvis’s disembodied voice responded faithfully.

“God, _seriously_ , Jane?” Darcy exclaimed, “You couldn’t look away from you shiny weather maker for three whole seconds to look at the clock? What, is the world going to explode if you look away?”

“Yes...maybe.” Jane’s tone was completely serious, and slightly distracted, “And it’s not a weather maker, Darcy. Do you even listen to anything I tell you?”

“Do _you_?” Darcy shot back. And she left her follow-up comment unsaid, _There are other things in the world that are important too, Jane! Not every problem can be solved with your space gadgets._

Jane didn’t answer her and Darcy assumed she was using her obsessed genius superpower - the ability to not hear anything at all unless it pertained to your research. With a sigh she resigned herself to her fate of chasing after Jane with warm food and slowly rose from her stool, her google search about Africa and the ‘Monsanto Law’ put on hold for a later time. 

“Right, you stay there and keep working on your world exploding not-weather-machine, then,” she offered, “I’ll go find something for you to eat. You have ten minutes to get that thing into a non-world-threatening working order, then I’m shoving whatever food I find down your throat. It’s way beyond lunch time in America.”

She left without waiting for an answer, mainly because she knew she wouldn’t get one. Jane had already put silly concepts like time and nutrition in the back of her mind where they wouldn’t bother her, her sole focus on the tweezers in her left hand and soldering iron in her right and whatever it is they were doing to the not-weather-making-machine in front of her.

Darcy found the kitchen occupied when she waltzed through the swinging doors at the far end of the room. Apparently Jane wasn’t the only one who decided lunch was supposed to be eaten hours and hours after noon. The woman who had been looking through the cupboards that held all of the cereal turned when she heard Darcy enter and for a split second Darcy contemplated also turning...turning and leaving the room immediately. There were more kitchens in the Avengers Tower, she could find food in one of the others.

The only thing that prevented her from practically running out of the room the second she recognized Wanda Maximoff was a quick glance around the kitchen, which revealed the girl’s brother was nowhere to be found. Darcy let out a slow breath that she hadn’t realized she had been holding and stood awkwardly just beyond the doorway, one of the doors still swinging slightly after her entrance.

“So,” she started slowly, drawing out the vowel and trying her hardest to look as if she hadn’t just been about to run away, “Late lunch?”

Wanda tilted her head to the side, gazing at Darcy with the most stolid expression Darcy had ever seen on anyone’s face. And she had seen a _lot_ of stolid expressions, what with SHIELD agents surrounding her on a daily basis. But she couldn’t complain, even inexpressive and serious was better than the disdain she was used to receiving from the Maximoffs, or the full on head-exploding death-glare Pietro had given her a week ago. Darcy had been right about her speculations; that glare _had_ haunted her nightmares.

After glancing at the open cabinet behind Wanda and seeing it lined with boxes and boxes of cereal she added as an afterthought, “Or a _super late_ breakfast?”

“Is it late if I am only hungry now?” Wanda asked.

Her accent was heavy but Darcy was relieved to discover that she did in fact speak English. And well enough to be understood too! Sokovian schools must have fairly decent English teachers. Realizing that Darcy actually knew very little about Sokovia’s educational system and how it related to the political and economic structure of the country, she made a mental note to check into it later. Between the Monsanto Law and Sokovian education, Google was going to be her best friend tonight. 

“Hey, I wasn’t judging. Whatever floats your boat.” Darcy offered, hands up in surrender as she moved forward towards the fridge. “Any chance you’ve already had a glance at the fridge and can tell me what kinds of leftovers we have?”

Wanda shook her head but offered no comment, expecting Darcy to see the movement. Once the fridge was opened, it didn’t take Darcy more than five seconds to determine what she was warming up for herself and Jane. She didn’t know what it was, to be honest, but it was in a styrofoam container with “Tony’s, STOP EATING MY FOOD, PEOPLE” scrawled very sloppily across the top of it so she just _had_ to eat it. Tony was basically _begging_ for someone to eat it, and Darcy was more than happy to be that someone. With Jane’s help. 

She hastily removed it from the fridge, opened the box, and mentally high fived herself for picking what looked like very delicious curry. Tony Stark had great taste in food. Putting it onto a plate and throwing it in the microwave, she tossed the now useless styrofoam container into the trash and glanced over at the other girl in the kitchen.

Wanda looked from the container with Stark’s message to Darcy’s bored expression. She liked that Darcy could look as if she hadn’t just done something wrong openly, in front of witnesses. Or maybe she just looked like she didn’t care.

“Stark will be very upset.” Wanda murmured.

Darcy’s expression didn’t change, she just looked away from the microwave and down to her nails, picking at the polish chipping there. “Yeah, well. The guy’s had this entire building trashed by aliens and robots and got over it pretty quickly. I’m sure he’ll survive this.”

Wanda said nothing in response and Darcy wondered briefly if she disapproved of her actions. But she couldn’t bring herself to care. She also wondered briefly if Wanda’s brother would be making a grand appearance anytime soon; she rarely saw the two apart and was beginning to wonder if they even shared the same bedroom at night. To keep herself distracted from the near terror she felt at thinking of Pietro waltzing in here and setting her on fire, she did what she always did...talk.

“So I read about this crazy thing happening in Africa today,” she mentioned casually, as if this wasn’t something she was practically dying to talk about.

Wanda continued to gaze at her for only a moment longer before turning back to the cereal cabinet and contemplating her options. “What country in Africa?” she inquired.

“Well, the article focused on Ghana, but it’s about a bill that’s being passed in a lot of countries in Africa. Some kind of overlord bill that has to be passed in order for the countries to join the G7 New Alliance, whatever that is. They’re calling it the Monsanto Law. Wait,” Darcy paused, watching as Wanda poured some cheerios into a bowl, “Do you know what Monsanto is?”

Wanda pursed her lips and let her mind wander through all of the thoughts she had gathered recently. “I have heard the term, yes.” She moved to walk around Darcy and retrieve milk from the refrigerator, “It is a farming company, yes? Many people are angry about food being created that is not healthy. Monsanto creates this food?”

Darcy nodded. “Yeah, Monsanto is basically the coolest thing to protest nowadays. If you want to feel like you’re a part of a cause you can just say you hate Monsanto and everyone thinks you’re deep and give a damn about the world. Everyone is all up in arms about GMOs and organic food and how Monsanto is poisoning the water supply or something. They’re missing the point though.”

“What is the point?” Wanda questioned, “It seems poisoning water supply is a bad thing, to me.”

“Oh yeah, for sure. But they’re not actually doing that. Well, maybe a little, as a side effect of pesticides, I guess. But that’s not what’s bad about them. This thing with Ghana, and Africa, it’s basically this huge mega-corporation, Monsanto, coming into nations that are unprepared to defend themselves against it and stealing their farmland! People are calling it a new wave of colonialism!”

Wanda’s eyes hardened at that and Darcy had a brief flashback to the look Pietro gave her before she basically ran away from him. But this time Darcy was prepared for the look, welcomed it even. This was the expression she had wanted to see on Jane’s face when she dropped that line on her boss earlier. 

“How do they do this? These Monsanto people?” Wanda’s voice was as cold as her eyes. Darcy swallowed nervously, glad that Wanda’s only power was reading minds and didn’t involve hulking out when she was pissed off.

Then she shrugged. “The same way they did it here. They pass laws, tell farmers that they can’t save seeds to replant in the next harvest. They patent their own seeds and wait for insects to cross-pollinate their crops with neighboring farms and then claim that the neighboring farms have stolen their seeds. They have a lot of money, so they can pay for the best lawyers. And the best lawyers can make the laws that are supposed to defend people worthless. By the time Monsanto is done with a small farmer in court, the corporation owns all of the crops that farm produces and the entire farm itself. And then the farmer is forced to work on land he no longer owns and actually _pay_ this massive corporation to plant crops he doesn’t want to plant on land they _stole_ from him.” She was nearly out of breath by the time she had finished explaining how Monsanto worked, “It’s a genius business model, really. Very impressive from a global political perspective as well. This one corporation owns practically all of the farmland in the world. It doesn’t care about borders.”

“In my experience corporations rarely care about borders, this is not so impressive to me.” Wanda told her in a flat tone, her accent adding a darkness and heaviness to the words. “This is what they are doing in Ghana? Your article said this?”

Darcy nodded her head, glancing behind her to see how much time was left on the microwave before her food would finish warming. “Well, they’re starting to. The Monsanto Law would basically prevent farmers in Ghana from saving seeds at the end of a harvest season. Instead of replanting those seeds they would have to buy seeds from the corporation. It’s extra disgusting because Ghana has the most incredible agricultural community left in the world.” she glanced at Wanda to see if the other woman seemed interested in what she had to say. 

By now Wanda had seated herself at a nearby counter and was eating her cereal, but she didn’t look at all bothered by Darcy’s conversation. In fact, she looked extremely interested. Darcy didn’t mean to boast, but she could definitely tell when she had people hooked on a good story. And this was a good story. Jane was dumb for not realizing how interesting this story was.

“So, in Ghana, they have this tradition where all of the farmers share seeds. One person will have one crop and another will plant something else. Then they share the seeds so that both farms can have both crops. Here in America, it’s all competition and trying to outdo your neighbor.” Darcy explained, a little more excited to share this information about the difference between Ghanaian and American farming than was probably normal, “If someone’s crop is doing poorly you’re glad because that means you’ll have higher prices for your own crop - supply and demand. But in Ghana, you share your seeds _knowing_ that maybe your crop will do poorly, or will die before the season is over, and you hope that since both of you are planting the same type of food, one of your crops will survive so that the food can be in the community that year. Ghanaian farmers have a community, where sharing is the heart of the community and hoping for success for yourself _as well as your neighbor_ is just part of being a farmer. And this stupid Monsanto Law, that would ruin all of it. American capitalism strikes again.”

Wanda was silent for a moment and Darcy took the time to look behind her and realize that the microwave timer had dinged at some point while she was ranting. She ignored the ache in her tired arms to reach up and open the door, checking to see if the curry was warm enough. Yep! One plate of delicious left-over curry, courtesy of Tony Stark, coming right up! When she turned back around and noticed the Maximoff woman was still silently seated at the counter, she began to worry that she had maybe ranted a little too much. 

“Umm, sorry,” she muttered, trying to bring back the neutral tone she always used, sounding eager and interested in things always made her self-conscious, “Guess I got a little carried away. No one ever really listens to my stuff. Well, no one except for Jarvis, but I mean he’s a computer, he kind of has to listen. I wonder if he gets bored.” She mumbled the last part as an aside, not fully realizing she had said it aloud. “So, my food’s done.” Stating the obvious was kind of her thing when she was self-conscious, “I should probably bring this down to Jane. Sorry for, you know, ruining your breakfast time. Even if it is _way_ too late in the day for that stuff.”

She was halfway to the door when Wanda’s voice finally met her ears. “It was interesting, your ‘stuff’.” The way she said the word made Darcy wonder if it was her first time trying the word out in this capacity. “You can tell me more sometime. About Ghana and these Monsanto people. I would like to learn.”

Darcy would have tripped over her own feet at the shock of hearing any kind of positive recognition about her interests, except she was way too cool for tripping over her own feet. Instead she merely wobbled a bit and turned around to face Wanda in the least graceful way humanly possible. She couldn’t think of anything relevant to say that wouldn’t sound like overly-emotional gushing gratitude for Wanda’s vague interest in some stupid article Darcy had only read twenty minutes ago. 

So instead she blurted the first thing that came to her mind: “You know I think this is the longest interaction I’ve had with anyone since I moved here, aside from Jarvis. And I basically live with Jane in her lab.”

And Wanda said the only thing she could have said that would have made Darcy feel like less of an idiot for saying something so ridiculous. “The scientist does not speak while working?”

Darcy snorted. “The scientist doesn’t speak about anything that isn’t super-genius mumbo-jumbo. And I definitely don’t talk about that. So it’s mostly just Jane talking to herself, whenever she _does_ talk. Sometimes I think Jane’s more like a robot than Jarvis.” 

To this Wanda had no response. So Darcy filled the silence again.

“Except robots don’t have to eat, and Jane definitely does. I should probably bring this down to her, before it gets cold.”

When Wanda nodded, Darcy turned around again and walked to the door, nearly colliding with a body that she was positive hadn’t been standing directly behind her right before she turned. “Jeeze,” Darcy swore, fumbling desperately with the warm plate in her hands in an attempt to avoid spilling it on both herself and the floor, “Personal space much?” she demanded, “Didn’t anyone teach you not to walk into the girl with the plate of food? This could have ended much _much_ worse for your shirt, dude! The turmeric in this crap does _not_ wash out.” 

Having successfully managed to properly balance both the plate of curry and her own awkward limbs without spilling anything on anyone, she finally looked up at whoever she had bumped into. The disdainful blue eyes that looked back down at her startled her so much that she was sure she would have dropped the plate of curry altogether right then and there if it hadn’t been for the fact that her fingers were too bruised and swollen to work. Apparently all of her hours spent punching that stupid bag were good for something after all: her fingers couldn’t function properly enough to cause her the insane amounts of humiliation dropping this plate would have caused. 

Darcy Lewis was fairly certain that Wanda’s brother would actually murder her with or without his super secret superpower if she dropped an entire plate of curry on his fancy running shoes. 

“You, umm,” for once, she had absolutely nothing to say. His blue eyes were so intense and he looked like he felt personally insulted by her words when she had run into him. He also looked like he had plans to do something about being personally insulted.

Darcy wondered how she could have aced a class focused on the Cold War and _not_ learned what to say in tense situations that seemed comparable to nuclear bomb threat levels rising.

“Pietro,” Wanda’s neutral voice drifted through the tension and Darcy had never felt more relieved to have such pretty blue eyes focus on another woman, “Why are you so late? I have been waiting here for more than I expected.”

And then he was moving past Darcy as if she didn’t even exist, and Darcy was remembering to take those deep slow breaths that calmed heartbeats. 

“You did not tell me the proper place,” his voice was deeper than she expected of such a skinny man and Darcy made a quick mental note that apparently _both_ twins spoke English before she hurried towards the swinging doors and much safer territory. “You said small kitchen in living room, no? This is larger kitchen. Not in a living room, Wanda.” His comment followed Darcy out the door and down the hall and she wondered briefly if she would now have to worry about his eyes _and_ his voice haunting her nightmares. 

By the time she made it back down to Jane’s lab her boss was standing by one of her boards, looking over the data Darcy had correlated a few hours ago. “That was definitely longer than ten minutes.” she commented when Darcy swiped her access card through the scanner and made her way into the large open space.

“Oh so _now_ you care about time.” Darcy added an eye roll to the sarcastic tone for added emphasis. “I picked out some curry, it looked like it was just _begging_ to be eaten.”

Jane nodded in a way that Darcy recognized as her 'preoccupied with something else nod', already focused on the new results again. “Curry is good.”

Darcy brought the plate over to her and held it in one hand while they both took forks and ate off of the same plate, still standing, both only half paying attention to the actual food. Jane was off wandering in the lands of quantum equations and time vortices. And Darcy?

Darcy was too busy trying to understand this feeling of complete contentment that had settled in her stomach. Well, after the sheer panic at possibly witnessing a scary super-human outburst had died down, of course. After that was gone, then contentment. She would wonder about it for the next few days, in between her intense google searches of Sokovian education and Ghanaian farming practices. And when the truth finally hit her, she would wonder why she had never realized how important it was for someone, just one _single_ person in this entire freaking tower, to acknowledge her interests.

It was more than acknowledging her interests. For the first time since Darcy Lewis had graduated from college, she felt like someone had acknowledged who she was as a person. She felt like she existed, for the first time in over a year.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I read this article about Ghana's farming situation before I started writing this chapter. It obviously influenced me more than is probably acceptable. If you're curious, you can find the inspiring article here: http://www.theecologist.org/campaigning/2874165/ghanas_women_farmers_resist_the_g7_plan_to_grab_africas_seeds.html
> 
> Darcy will totally be able to look at Pietro without running away before the end of the story, I swear! Just...not yet. Maybe really soon though :)
> 
> Thank you so much for the AMAZING comments! You guys are all such fantastic readers, you leave the most helpful, thoughtful comments any writer could ask for! I love them all! And thank you also for all of the kudos (over a hundred, holy heck you guys!!) and for all of the bookmarks! Your support is definitely what's keeping me going. I hope you all enjoyed this chapter, and will enjoy the next chapter, whenever it gets finished :)


	5. Precariously Close to the Edge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized"_

Jane Foster was away at some kind of a top secret science convention thing for the week, which meant one thing and one thing only: extra sleep. Darcy took the opportunity to squeeze every possible ounce of sleep out of the days of freedom. When your boss worked at insane hours day and night, _you_ worked insane hours day and night. Or at least you did if you were Darcy Lewis. So when your boss was nowhere to be found and you didn’t need to worry about staying up to babysit her, you could pretend to be a normal person who worked normal hours. Normal people slept in until noon every day, right? That was totally a thing.

It wasn’t until half past noon that Darcy found herself in the shared living room that had a small kitchen attached to it, a bowl of half-forgotten cereal sitting precariously close to the edge of the counter she was perched at, her laptop open and more than a thousand tabs of articles open on the browser before her. Okay, maybe that was exaggerating a tiny bit, but seriously, she had way more tabs open than anyone sane needed. She was so engrossed in her research into this whole G7 New Alliance thing that she didn’t even realize others had entered the kitchen until she heard a cabinet door slam shut with more force than was necessary. In other words, it was loud, and it bothered Darcy.

At first she only spared a passing glance at the source of the noise, assuming it must be Steve forgetting his own strength again. But the shock of brightly bleached hair that caught her eye as she gave the first careless glance made her do a double take, her attention fully drawn away from the article in front of her. A startled noise somewhere in between a gasp and yelp made its way from her chest to her mouth and out past her lips before she had the chance to stop it and two pairs of eyes turned simultaneously towards her.

“What the hell?” she affected an annoyed tone to cover up the embarrassment of practically peeing her pants when she recognized Wanda’s brother standing in front of the recently slammed cupboard, “Seriously, where did you guys come from? Is that your thing?” she demanded, trying to sound half disinterested and half irritated, “Showing up out of nowhere?”

Wanda did not seem at all surprised by her response. Her calculating brown eyes shifted only briefly away from where they were scanning packages of pre-made meals to give Darcy a barely interested look before she turned back to her food options. 

Pietro, in comparison, looked somewhere between irritated and… _amused_? Darcy would admit that she didn’t know the guy nearly well enough to know any of his expressions, but there was definitely something different about the particular brand of irritated glare he was throwing her way right now. It was something she might have thought a little longer about if she wasn’t so preoccupied with the fact that he looked much less likely to kill her right now than he had in their previous two encounters. But that didn’t really mean anything, did it? A wild animal always looks the most innocent right before it strikes.

“You were very much paying attention only to your computer,” Wanda’s heavy accent floated through the air between them, interrupting Darcy’s train of thought, “You did not see us come in. We have been talking quite loudly since we entered.” she murmured, almost as an afterthought. As if that should have made Darcy aware of their presence before Anger Management Issues had decided to slam the cabinet door.

Darcy spared a brief moment to contemplate what exactly Wanda considered ‘ _quite loudly_ ,’ especially considering the European woman had hardly ever spoken at volumes above a library voice during the entire encounter she and Darcy had shared a few weeks ago. 

Pietro said nothing about the matter, instead having focused all of his attention on Wanda as she spoke. It was an intense and slightly uncomfortable exchange to witness, if Darcy was being honest with herself; Pietro had turned away from rummaging through the cupboards and fixed Wanda with a very intense stare, as if waiting for her to answer an important question. Or maybe waiting for her to grow a second head, Darcy couldn’t really tell what his expressions implied. Wanda, for her part, continued comparing different packages of rice based meals, ignoring her brother entirely. And Darcy had the distinct feeling she was ignoring him deliberately. 

It was all very disconcerting to watch, and since she didn’t want to draw any more head-exploding, glaring attention to herself, she decided to turn away from the scene completely and act as if she didn’t exist at all. Maybe she could camouflage herself into the environment and Pietro Maximoff would forget she was there at all. _Be a chair, Darcy_ , she thought to herself, _Channel your inner kitchen stool._ She lifted the bowl of now completely soggy coco puffs off the pristine marble counter and began to eat the previously forgotten cereal as she turned back to her article. 

If she was going to be completely honest with herself, a fairly large portion of Darcy was thrilled that Jane was away. It meant that she could spend all the time she wanted researching everything that was happening with Ghana and the industrial agribusiness corporations. And she had been finding a _lot_ of mind blowing data in the past few days. It spoke volumes about just how important this topic had become to her that she stopped noticing the presence of the two Avengers in the room as soon as she turned back to her computer. It also spoke volumes that she hadn’t been watching the clock for once in her life and was actually startled that enough time had passed for the Maximoffs' food to have been successfully boiled or steamed or warmed up or whatever the hell you were supposed to do to those boxes of “ready to eat spiced rice with tomato.” She hadn’t noticed until Wanda’s soft voice broke through her concentration.

“What has happened to your fingers?”

When she looked in the direction the voice had come from, Wanda and Pietro were both holding steaming bowls of rice carefully in their laps and were sitting down on the couch a few feet away. She wondered briefly if they were intentionally keeping their distance from her, considering there _was_ a perfectly good counter which had been made for the sole purpose of providing a space to eat your food and she happened to be sitting at said counter demonstrating that very fact, or if they just preferred sitting on couches to eat lunch. 

Darcy managed to spare a glance down at her hands before opening her mouth to answer. Her fingers were very swollen, the skin around every joint in her hand painted red and blue in bruises. The skin around her knuckles didn’t exist anymore, instead it was just a vibrant pinkish where they had split open and bled every day. Her time behind a tightly locked gym door hadn’t ceased after those first two days. 

Every day, for the past few weeks, she would use whatever free time she had and continue to attempt punching that stupid blue bag. It wasn’t always easy finding the time, Jane’s schedule was so hectic and inconsistent that Darcy wasn’t entirely sure how she managed to function at all as a human being. Hadn’t scientists ever heard of that thing called a daily routine? Regardless of her unpredictable work schedule, Darcy still managed to hit the bag at least once a day, squeezing in ten minutes here and twelve minutes there, sometimes going for a full two hours before Jarvis told her that Jane needed her back at the labs. 

It hadn’t gotten any easier, the working out thing, and in fact the pain that shot through her hand every time her fist connected with whatever strange material punching bags were covered with almost made it harder now than it had been in the beginning. She had begun wrapping the towel that she brought with her around whatever hand she was jabbing with, clumsily swapping the towel to her other hand whenever the terrible 80’s haired douchebags in the video had their audience switch to punching with a new arm. It softened the impact of her knuckles colliding with the punching bag, but it couldn’t take away the ache fully.

But she couldn’t tell Wanda about all of this; she couldn’t tell anyone. She had only had one legitimate conversation with the woman, they were certainly not anywhere near ‘let me reveal my embarrassing soul to you’ levels of intimacy. Trying and failing to improve her physical prowess was Darcy’s thing, and only Darcy’s.

“Umm,” Darcy’s always sarcastic and fairly clever mind - in her opinion - came up with absolutely no sarcastic or clever excuse, “Clumsiness?” And the lie sounded even more like a lie in the way it left her lips, forming a question rather than a statement.

 _Oh well done, Darcy, lie to the mind reader._ Her brain scolded her after the fact, but where was it when she needed a useful excuse, huh? Some use that mind of hers was. A quick glance at said mind-reader left Darcy feeling slightly better; Wanda’s expression remained neutral. If she had heard the truth in Darcy’s mind, she hadn’t let on. Maybe she couldn’t read every thought? Or maybe she wasn’t always listening? Darcy could always hope.

What took away any ‘ _better_ ' feeling she had was a glance at Wanda’s brother. Why did she keep doing that? Why did she keep insisting on looking at him when he just popped any comfort bubble she ever had, always? Or, at least the last two times she had seen him. And also now. Three times was more than enough to count as ‘always,’ as far as Darcy was concerned.

Pietro Maximoff was shoveling large spoonfuls of ready to eat rice in his mouth, but the expression on his face had turned back to dangerous. His eyes were cold; Darcy could imagine seeing the same eyes on a serial killer, like Jack the Ripper. But they were more than cold, they were a combination of cold and angry. In Darcy’s world, everything was fight or flight, and she went for flight every time. Flight, or taser. This look on the taller Maximoff's face triggered every instinct in her that screamed, _Flight! Flight! Flight!_ at the top of its lungs. 

“He will do nothing to you. Only glare angrily.” Wanda’s voice cut through her thoughts just as Darcy was shifting to move from her seat and leave the room. 

It took Darcy a moment to realize that Wanda was talking about her brother. And it took another moment for Darcy to determine whether she had spoken aloud about how uncomfortable Pietro was making her right now. When she had decided fairly conclusively that she was definitely not idiotic enough to talk about her potential murderer _right in front of him_ , she felt her mouth drop open.

“How did you…” Darcy’s voice trailed off slowly as her mind caught up with her mouth. Mind-reader. You’d think she could remember these basic things. And not be surprised by them. “Right. Well, I’d rather not take my chances, so…” She grabbed her cereal bowl and headed over to the sink. She hadn’t wanted to finish those soggy coco puffs anyway. 

Wanda had seemed nice enough the last time they had talked, and Darcy was sure that she wouldn’t intentionally put her in harm’s way, but maybe Wanda wasn’t an accurate judge of how far her brother would go. Darcy didn’t trust anyway who was so quick to anger and who looked like _that_ every time they were angry.

“No, stay.” Wanda’s voice was very even, almost calming, but it wasn’t working on Darcy. She was leaving this room. Nothing could stop her. “Tell me more about these farmers. The ones in Ghana. You promised, no?”

Darcy had just turned on the faucet and was about to rinse the milk and cereal from her bowl when Wanda’s words cut through her actions, causing her arm to stop a few inches short of actually managing to get the bowl under the faucet. Water streamed from the open tap and Darcy stared blankly at Wanda as she replayed the words in her head, considering her options. Someone actually wanted to hear more about one of Darcy’s crazy political science major gone rogue rants. It was so surprising to her that she briefly wondered if she had imagined the words altogether. It felt _awesome_ to think about sharing her most recent findings with someone. On the other hand, someone else in the room was capable of making Darcy feel like hunted prey every time he looked at her….so _that_ was a drawback.

“You are wasting the water.” Pietro’s voice was different than she remembered it being. It was sterner, and didn’t sound nearly as calm as it had when he had spoken to Wanda all those weeks ago. She felt as if she were a child being scolded.

So she rolled her eyes at him before she could stop herself. She immediately regretted the action and hastily shut the water off without rinsing her bowl to make up for it. Well, apparently she was going to be eating soggy cereal after all. She really needed to make up her mind on this whole, ‘to finishing eating or not to finish eating’ thing.

“Promise is a really strong word.” she mentioned slowly, buying herself time to weigh her options, “We only use it when someone has _actually_ said, ‘I promise to, blah blah blah.’ I definitely didn’t do that.” Teaching the Eastern Europeans English, that was always a great way to buy time. 

“It cannot be implied?” Wanda seemed legitimately curious about the proper application of the word.

“Yeah, I mean sometimes. But definitely not in such a casual way. And also _definitely_ not when one person says something would be nice to do again and the other doesn’t say anything in response.” 

“So the last time we spoke, was not implied promise?” Wanda asked for assurance.

Darcy shook her head, still standing by the sink, still undecided about whether she was going to run like a coward or stay and share some of the super interesting facts she had uncovered in her most recent google search. “Nope, definitely not. Just a really nice thing to think about, you know, one day talking about Ghana some more. It was like a vague plan for the future, not really a promise.” Darcy explained.

Wanda nodded to herself, took a bite of her lunch, and then tilted her head with a contemplative expression. “So it was nice to think about doing, but you will not do it now? Only because of Pietro.” She clarified, seamlessly transition the topics from learning the proper use of the word _promise_ to her earlier request to have Darcy stay.

If Darcy Lewis had been more self-aware, or paying closer attention, she may have noticed that she was being manipulated in not-so-subtle ways. As it stood, she wasn’t paying much attention to how Wanda led her along with her words, more focused instead on the way the taller Maximoff was watching Wanda in that same intense way he had been earlier while they were deciding what to eat. And Wanda seemed to be once again intentionally ignoring him, her eyes never leaving Darcy. It made Darcy just as uncomfortable watching it this time as it had earlier, and it was enough to distract her from noticing how perfectly logically all of Wanda’s words and implications seemed to ring in Darcy’s head...too perfectly.

“When you put it like that, it seems a little silly.” Darcy hedged.

Wanded nodded, ate another forkful of rice. “Good, so stay and finish your lunch. And tell me more of Ghana farmers.” her tone was very decisive. Darcy probably would have done anything said to her in that tone. It made her think of when Thor said, well, just about anything. And she definitely did _everything_ Thor told her to do, no questions asked.

“Ghanaian.” Darcy corrected without thinking as she took a step away from the sink and toward her laptop, which still rested innocently on the marble counter. When both twins met her with blank expressions, she clarified. “It’s ‘Ghanaian farmers,’ not ‘Ghana farmers.’ Like ‘American idiots,’ not ‘America idiots.’” Both twins were still watching her with matching expressions, their eyes very intent but the emotion behind them was very difficult for Darcy to interpret. “Sorry, the correcting thing is really annoying, I know. Jane does it to me all the time and I hate it. I guess, maybe the habits you hate the most rub off on you the easiest? Is that a thing?”

She was sitting down on a chair at the counter again, her bowl of cereal still clutched as loosely as she could manage, her fingers aching from the effort of just holding something. Neither of the Maximoffs made any attempt to answer her question, or acknowledge that she had corrected Wanda’s grammar at all. She wondered if they could both read minds. Maybe they were having a conversation with each other in their heads about how ridiculous she was. That wasn’t a paranoid thing to think, was it?

Eventually the silence in the room stretched on long enough that Darcy decided it wouldn’t end at all if she didn’t do something to end it. So she cleared her throat. “Right,” she said slowly, trying desperately to feel less awkward under the intense gazes, “Ghana. Did you want to know anything in particular or just, you know, how American companies basically destroy everything they touch?”

Pietro’s eyes widened so quickly it was actually startling and disconcerting to witness. So disconcerting, in fact, that it drew Darcy’s full attention. What was _wrong_ with this kid? What could she have _possibly_ said to startle him so thoroughly with just a single sentence? Was he terrified that American companies were going to destroy him too, now that they were practically touching him every day...well, relatively speaking...they did live a few floors above Stark Industries after all.

Wanda was thankfully much less affected. Her eyes on Darcy were mildly curious, if Darcy was any judge, and that was all. Mild curiosity was definitely a much more appropriate response than shocked out of your mind. Darcy had absolutely no doubt in her mind that Wanda was the more mentally stable of the twins.

“Nothing in particular, no,” Wanda murmured, “It is just interesting. I know nothing about the happenings in Africa, with these big American companies.”

Darcy nodded, her eyes glancing sideways at the most recent article she had read, still open on her laptop. “‘Kay, but it’s your fault if I just pile a bunch of boring facts onto you. No complaints later.” Darcy announced, finally taking another bite of her cereal. Jeeze, how long had it been sitting in this milk? It was almost oatmeal consistency. And the milk was warm! Ugh. “I actually just finished reading a bunch of interesting data right before Superman over there slammed the cupboard door and scared the crap out of me.” For some reason, mentioning Pietro’s existence was much less nerve-wracking when his eyes were still the size of golf-balls in his head. “Apparently, ten corporations in world control more than seventy-five percent of the world’s commercial seed market."

“Monsanto is one of these corporations?” Wanda interrupted before Darcy could continue.

“Yeah, probably. I didn’t look up the names of the companies or anything but, I mean, they have to be. Honestly Monsanto is probably all ten of the corporations, just broken up in different ways and given different names so that they look less threatening. But that’s crazy, right? Seventy-five percent of _all_ of the entire world’s seeds are owned by ten mega-corporations! I mean, imagine if these companies went all Ultron on us and tried to take over the world? They literally could! They control basically _all_ of the food supply!”

“This is no different from Stark.” It wasn’t Wanda who responded but Pietro. His eyes had finally returned to their normal size and quality - angry. He rose from the couch he was sitting on and walked past the counter Darcy was seated at to the kitchen, where he preceded to refill his bowl with more rice. “Stark controls all of the world’s weapons. If he wanted the world…” his voice dropped off before he finished his sentence, but everyone in the room understood the implications.

“Whoa there. First of all, Tony is fricken _Iron Man_. If he had wanted to control the world he probably would have done it years ago. Or jumped on board with the whole psychotic Norse god teamed up with aliens invading the planet thing.” Darcy argued, suddenly forgetful of how intimidated she was of the man standing in front of her, “And second, Stark Industries gave up the weapons game a long time ago. The only explosives Tony’s packing are in Iron Man’s weapons system.”

“Is still a weapons system.” Pietro argued.

Darcy was more than a little surprised by the turn of the conversation. They must be _way_ behind the times in Sokovia if the Maximoffs were still up in arms about Tony’s past bad decisions. The U.S. had gotten over that little hangup years ago. “Are you seriously comparing a company’s global domination of the food market to a branch of Tony’s company that was shut down _years_ ago? Global starvation could actually be huge threat.”

“In my experience, bombs make also very big threats. And very real. Not just possibility.” 

Darcy almost glared at him. _Almost_. But the part of her that hated Tony’s ego about his wealth kept her from it. The part of her that could definitely imagine him having an entire floor in this building dedicated to a pool full of gold coins and jewels kept her from it. The part of her that knew all of that wealth came from selling weapons to the U.S. military in the past kept her from it. The part of her that was constantly trying to reconcile her frustration with globally powerful corporations and how awesome Tony Stark was kept her from glaring. But it didn’t keep her from hating the direction the conversation was heading. 

“I don’t think you’re seeing the bigger picture here,” she muttered under her breath. From the way Wanda’s eyes quickly left Darcy’s to fall upon her brother, Darcy knew that the other woman had heard her and was waiting for a reaction. But judging from the imminent silence after her comment, she was fairly certain that Pietro had not. Which she was actually slightly grateful for. She really did _not_ want to have a full blown argument with Hulk Jr. or Head-Exploding-Man, or whatever his superhuman deal was. “So do you wanna hear the rest of my percentages or did you just wanna keep insulting the guy who got you a U.S. visa?”

Pietro’s eyes narrowed very dangerously, and Darcy once more remembered the feeling of prey about to be devoured by a predator. But he didn’t answer her. He merely finished filling his bowl with rice and moved back to his spot beside Wanda on the couch, all of his body tense and posture rigid.

No one spoke for a very long time. Darcy found herself once again debating between running from the man with the obvious anger management issues and being bored and alone in her room, or staying here and having a chance to talk to at least _one_ person about everything happening continents away. Her instincts told her run. And she was never one to ignore her instincts. After all, that had saved her from a crazy man who was going to attack Jane and Dr. Selvig late at night in New Mexico...who also turned out to be a god...so maybe that wasn’t the best example. But still.

"I am interested still in your Ghana information." Wanda finally murmured.

“Eighty percent of all of the seeds in Africa still come from small local farming communities.” she found herself blurting out eagerly at Wanda's comment. And for the first time in her life, Darcy’s instincts were not the first thing she followed. 

Pietro was back to shoveling massive spoonfuls of rice into his mouth while glaring disdainfully at her. Wanda only continued to stare at her with mild curiosity. Still, neither of the twins spoke.

“That’s important,” Darcy said slowly, feeling the weight of her audience’s silence, “Because, I mean think of it. If it’s all local farmers, then the seeds they’re using are totally adapted to the environment they’re being planted in, and to the needs of the community in terms of nutrition and even flavors for traditional recipes. Plus it means that all of the food goes to the community and all of the money that exchanges hands for agricultural goods, like the food that’s grown, stays in the community. But a huge outside corporation will sell seeds that are adapted to other environments. Crops that can survive in American weather would probably shrivel up pretty quickly in a lot of African countries.”

The Maximoffs hadn’t shifted even the slightest bit since she began speaking again, except for their eating of course. It was unnerving how still their faces could remain. Neither took the opportunity to say anything when Darcy paused, so she continued, trying harder to explain why these numbers mattered.

“It’s probably done intentionally, having seeds for crops that won’t last a season. It forces farmers to buy more seeds again the next year. And all of the money that the community spends on produce from that crop, it doesn’t stay in the community, it goes to Monsanto. So the people will keep paying more and more; farmers will pay more for seeds and pesticides and fertilizers to make the seeds survive in their climate, and people in the community will pay for the food the farmers produce so that they can eat. More and more money will leave the communities and go straight to Monsanto. The company is basically sticking a knife in their gut and letting them die by bleeding out slowly.”

Darcy paused again, having run out of breath after rushing through her explanation. The slight scratch against the back of her throat made her realize that she had been talking a _lot_ louder than she had expected to. She always used to speak much louder when she was excited or aggravated about things in the past, it was something she couldn’t control. But she hadn’t been excited enough to hurt her vocal chords from talking so loudly in a long time; she had actually forgotten what it felt like. 

The Maximoffs remained silent. Pietro’s eyes were darting unnervingly rapidly between Wanda and Darcy. Darcy wasn’t sure she had ever seen eyes move so quickly before. Was that even normal? Wanda’s eyes were very intent on Darcy, and very cold. It was a calculated sort of cold, the kind that seemed an acceptable response to information about mega-corporations trying to take over the world and leave poor communities even poorer.

“So, it all kind of sucks.” Darcy finished lamely, not really knowing what else to say. She thought that Wanda got what she was trying to explain, the importance of the percentages, the importance of Monsanto lowering that eighty-percent of farmer owned seeds and raising the seventy-five percent of crops that they owned globally. 

And still, the Maximoffs remained absolutely silent. Darcy was glad Pietro hadn’t tried to compare this to Tony again, because she wasn’t sure how she would handle that argument. Mostly she would just be pissed that bringing up Stark Industries and weapons was comparable to invalidating everything that Darcy had just talked about, putting priority on bombs and taking it off of entire communities being destroyed for the sake of money. And she was definitely heated enough from thinking about how much damage the Monsanto Law could do to farming communities in Africa to respond very poorly if Pietro said something she didn’t like. She could imagine herself throwing her laptop at him - Tony would definitely buy her a new one when he found out she trashed her old one to defend his honor. Or tasing him. That could definitely happen as well.

When the silence lasted for minutes, Darcy began to fidget. It started with her leg, which began to shake up and down nervously. What did a person have to say to get a response out of these Eastern Europeans? She found herself wondering if they sat this silently through comedy acts. When her leg shaking wasn’t enough to make Darcy feel any less uncomfortable with the silence, she began to drum her fingers on her lap.

Or rather, she _attempted_ to drum her fingers on her lap but the action caused the muscles in her fingers to protest loudly and the ache she was just beginning to learn how to ignore came rushing back to the forefront of her attention. This habit, nervously tapping her fingers whenever it was too quiet or she was too bored, was honestly one of the biggest drawbacks of hitting punching bags. It was a nearly unbreakable habit, as far as Darcy could tell, and it always made her wish someone would just chop off her hands at the wrist and replace them with better, not bruised, not swollen, not constantly aching hands.

Biting back a few choice expletives at the unexpected discomfort, Darcy glanced down at her hands and decided that now was as good a time as any to see if the gym was empty. Especially considering her Eastern European audience was still playing the silent game with her.

She didn’t know what conversations were like Sokovia, but here in America if you asked someone to stay and talk to you, you were expected to talk back. And if you didn’t? Well, then Darcy didn’t have to feel so guilty about getting up to actually rinse out her bowl and leave this time. Wanda had wanted to learn more about Ghana, and now she had. Darcy had wanted to share her new findings with someone interested and, well she wasn’t entirely positive Wanda was all that interested anymore, but she definitely had been originally. They had both gotten what they wanted, sort of, and now Darcy could move on to the next thing: 80’s porno music, mullets, white dude afros, and unending amounts of aching joints.

“What is it that you do here, exactly?” She was surprised that it was Pietro’s voice that broke the silence and stopped her five steps from the doorway. She had expected it to be Wanda who finally said something as she was leaving, one final remark.

Instead she turned around to find the man staring at her with the most intense blue eyes she had ever seen. And she had looked deep into the gaze Thor, God of Thunderlicious Biceps and Thighs. So that was saying something.

Darcy thought briefly of answering him with the truth: research assistant. But then she thought of answering him with the more honest truth: I run around feeding a mad scientist and glue pictures of the sky together for her. And that thought made her bitter. And defensive. And embarrassed. And she was already so close to the doorway that she felt brave enough to answer him the way she would have answered anyone else in this situation.

“Not much more than you, obviously.”

And then she turned and left the room, at a normal pace she was very pleased to note. No running this time. She may have also noticed a very small smile forming on Wanda's lips just before she turned to leave. It was the first smile she had seen on the woman’s face and she couldn’t help but think it made her look beautiful. Like a porcelain doll. But not the creepy ones that filled up old ladies’ houses and terrified you in the middle of the night.

“Bye.” she added as an afterthought when she was already standing on the other side of the doorless entryway, just so she would seem slightly less rude.

That night, Darcy would go to bed wondering if Wanda would ever ask her more about Ghana or Monsanto or anything else Darcy knew about huge corporations ruining the economies of small, often unnoticed countries.

That night, as Pietro and Wanda sat very close, murmuring to each other in the warm sounds of Sokovian that felt so much like home, a single thirty minute exchange that happened earlier in the day would be all he could think of. And he would wonder many things, but know that asking questions of Wanda never brought answers. 

So instead he would choose his words carefully and say, “You did not tell me of this Africa thing.”

And Wanda would just as carefully hide the answers he sought from her face and expression and instead offer him a truth that was not everything. “You did not ask if I had learned anything new.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I don't know whether to write the next chapter from Darcy's perspective for the third time in a row or give Pietro's perspective a shot. What do you guys think?? :)
> 
> To all of my commenters out there, I don’t know if there’s a notification that Ao3 sends ya but I just wanted you to know that **I actually respond to each and every one of your comments** :) I read them all and I use all of the feedback you’re giving me. And I really appreciate all of the time you guys are taking out of your day to even offer such fantastic feedback, so I think it’s only fair that I also take the time to respond to your comments personally. I hope my responses give you extra little tidbits and insight into the story, special things that the average reader wouldn’t be aware of :) (unless they’re also reading my responses to your comments, haha!) 
> 
> And to everyone who leaves kudos and bookmarks this story, I also appreciate that SO MUCH! Just the fact that you’re taking the time to push the kudo button means _so much_ to me! It’s keeping me going, I swear! You guys are honestly the sweetest, kindest readers out there! And I feel so spoiled to have all of you reading my story! Thank you, all of you!
> 
> I hope everyone enjoyed this chapter! If you’re still reading this story after so long, you're really freaking awesome and I appreciate you and your support SO MUCH! Thank you!!


	6. A Million Shards

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OH MY GOSH LOOK AT THE GORGEOUS COVER ART THAT **MElizabethPenn** MADE FOR THIS STORY!!!! Please, everyone, bow down and worship her! (although she has informed me she prefers hugs over worship) She is an amazing art goddess! And I _love_ this fanart! Thank you so much, MElizabethPenn!!! :D

Leather. The weird material that covered the stupid blue punching bag was leather. Darcy had determined this after a quick five minute Google search. It was either leather or vinyl, and Tony seemed way too classy to be paying for cheap plastic covered bags. Especially if it needed to withstand hits from superhumans like Captain America. Darcy had also learned that the huge bag hanging from the ceiling she was hitting was only one type of punching bag. It was called a "heavy bag," which made sense because she was pretty sure it weighed more than she did and could easily crush her ribcage if it somehow managed to come loose from its ceiling suspension and fall on her. All things considered, Darcy had learned a lot of technical jargon and useless boxing factoids in just five minutes on Wikipedia.

What she hadn't learned was how to actually hit the bag every time. Or how to hit it without feeling like her fingers were shattering at the knuckle. She had been practicing every day for weeks now, and she was still using the same thirty minute video from the 80's. She felt like she should have graduated beyond Mr. Mullet and his sidekick Whiteboy Afro, moved on to something made at least in the 90's. She also felt like she may have pulled something in her hand...were there even muscles that could get pulled in hands? Were there even muscles at all or was it all just ligaments and tendons? Needless to say, Darcy didn't remember much from her high school biology course.

"You know, if you want to take this seriously, you're going to have to start strengthening the muscles in your arms and shoulders."

The voice that interrupted Darcy's train of thought and lack of concentration was very smooth and sultry. She imagined she could hear it in a jazz bar, accompanied by a piano and twining through the air as effortlessly as all the smoke rising from so many cigarettes. She also knew she didn't recognize it at all.

She's pretty sure not recognizing the voice is what caused her to misstep halfway through a badly thrown jab. Misstep and fall, right onto her badly bruised knees. It was totally the surprise at being spoken to that caused it to happen, not Darcy's clumsiness or inability to throw a proper punch or anything else like that.

"I recommend pushups myself." And by the time Darcy got enough of her wits back to turn toward the voice she found herself face to face with the Black Widow herself. The Black Widow, for her part, stood there looking as if she hadn't just heard Darcy squeak in surprise and stumble gracelessly onto the floor. She was the epitome of nonplussed. “Before your actual workout. Every day.”

If Darcy was capable of blushing, she would have. Luckily for her, her built in shield system was working on overdrive to ensure she escaped from this morbidly humiliating encounter unscathed, and so her voice was already at mildly disinterested tones when she demanded, "How did you get in here? I know Jarvis locked that door, I heard it click."

"Every lock can be picked." The Black Widow answered in the most nonchalant tones Darcy had ever heard.

Darcy couldn’t even manage to stay surprised for more than a few seconds. “Right. Super spy.” Surprised, no. Impressed, yes. Darcy was very impressed. She was even pretty close to admitting it out loud. And she may have, if it hadn’t been for the fact that she distracted herself by hastily moving over to her laptop and hitting the spacebar, effectively silencing the terrible 80's porno music that was drifting through the room. “Umm, I know what that _sounded_ like, but I swear it’s not what you think.” she blurted self-consciously.

The woman standing by the closed door had the most impassive face Darcy had ever encountered, maybe even more impassive than Wanda's. She didn’t react in the slightest to Darcy’s fall, or to her rambling, or even to the terrible music that had been playing when she entered the room, or to Darcy’s terrible attempts at silencing it before she could notice. Obviously she had noticed it. But she never even so much as raised an eyebrow at it.

“I’m pretty sure it’s exactly what it sounded like.” The muscles in her face didn’t even move when she spoke! It was crazy! “You’re being smart, teaching yourself how to defend yourself. That’s what it sounded like to me.”

Darcy’s eyes were probably as close to surprised as they were capable of looking while her humiliation shields were up. “Yeah,” she scoffed, “I’m sure it sounded exactly like this when _you_ were learning how to save the world. Did you also have guys in mullets telling you when to step forward and hit a bag?”

“You’d be surprised.”

There was a moment of silence that passed between the two women in which Darcy managed to finally pick herself up off the floor, and the Black Widow remained where she was, close to the door, merely surveying the scene in front of her.

“I figured you would ask how I knew you were here.” she finally commented, when it was clear Darcy was for once at a complete loss for words.

“You knew I was here?” Darcy’s brain couldn’t quite process this new information. She was still working on processing the fact that the freaking _Black Widow_ had told her to do pushups! “That’s...creepy. Did you hack Jarvis’s surveillance feeds or something?” The more pertinent question - _why_ do you care that I’m here - had yet to become obvious enough for her to ask it.

“I didn’t need to.” she answered, her voice flat. “Your fingers. They told me more than Jarvis would. I noticed the bruises on your knuckles a while ago. When they didn’t fade…” she let her voice trail off, but Darcy understood the words left unsaid. 

“You figured you would come and see how much of an idiot I was making of myself.” she stated with a roll of her eyes. She was embarrassed. She was _beyond_ embarrassed. A top secret, I-Can-Take-Down-Assassins-With-My-Bare-Hands SHIELD agent had broken into the room just in time to catch Darcy in all of her terrible youtube guided glory. That is to say, a super spy who could probably take out any target in the world had just watched Darcy mess up a super basic punch, trip over her own feet, and fall to the ground. Today was probably the worst day of Darcy’s life.

“I got curious.” The Black Widow’s comment cut through Darcy’s internal pity party.

“Curiosity killed the cat.” Darcy grumbled to herself under her breath. It was childish, but she didn’t know what else to say to the woman standing in front of her. She didn’t even know the woman’s actual name! That’s how much of an untouchable enigma she was in Darcy’s life. And now she was standing here, saying words and stuff. And Darcy didn't know how to handle it.

“Luckily, I’m not a cat.” her tone was dry and Darcy realized she was smiling. Slightly. It surprised her; the Black Widow smiled? “Pushups, Lewis. Every day, before you start hitting that bag. It’ll make it easier, I promise.”

Darcy didn’t know what to say. Was the Black Widow offering her advice? Without laughing in her face at her ridiculous attempts at learning self-defense? She was dreaming. This was definitely a dream. And then something kind of dense smacked her in the chest. What kind of a dream was this?

“These are for your knuckles. They should fit properly, I’m pretty good at judging hand sizes.” 

Darcy looked down at floor and saw a pair of dark brown boxing gloves. They were massive. Darcy raised an incredulous eyebrow at the woman in front of her; how good could she possibly be at judging hand sizes when the gloves she had picked out were larger than Darcy’s head? 

“Did you just pull these out of thin air?” Darcy managed to ask in her flattest tone of voice, though she was pretty sure a bit of incredulity managed to sneak into the undertones.

“And these,” the Black Widow was stepping toward her now, offering her some kind of cloth rolled up into a tight wad of fabric, “Are for your wrists and hands. It’s extra support for your wrists and joints, so you don’t pull any muscles or damage your wrist. Boxing puts a lot of strain on your hands and wrists, sometimes your elbows if you’re not being careful. You’d be surprised how much pressure and weight you’re exerting when you make contact with the bag. You wrap the gauze around your wrist and palm, _tightly_. And then you put the gloves on over the wraps.”

“I don’t…” Darcy’s voiced trailed off and she looked from the Black Widow, whose hand was still outstretched towards her, to the linen in her outstretched hand, to the boxing gloves on the ground, and back again. She didn’t know what to say. She still wasn’t entirely convinced this was anything other than a dream. The Black Widow had broken into the gym, told Darcy to do pushups, thrown boxing gloves at her, and then lectured her about needing to support her wrists. “What?”

“I can show you how to wrap your wrists properly, if you want.” Unperturbed. The Black Widow was the definition of unperturbed. Darcy was pretty sure the SHIELD agent was the only person in the entire Tower who could have been put in this situation and somehow managed to make Darcy feel like less of a complete idiot.

“If I said I already knew how to do that?” Darcy challenged, trying desperately to save what little face she had left at this point. She was entirely positive she could just Google it and figure it out on her own.

“I would say you were the most idiotic person I’ve ever met for knowing how to protect your hands while boxing and refusing to do it.” the Black Widow answered back coolly. 

“Right.” Darcy said slowly, weighing her options, “But not for letting a couple of dudes in leotards teach her how to box?”

The SHIELD agent shrugged her shoulders. Darcy noted that up close, they were actually very well defined shoulders. Like, Darcy could see the outlines of muscles even though they were covered by a shirt! “I’d hardly call wanting to learn how to throw a proper punch idiotic.” she offered, taking a step closer to Darcy, still holding out the tightly rolled cloth. “Can I?”

Darcy weighed her options for a moment longer. No matter how hard she tried, at this point she couldn’t really do anything to spare herself any further humiliation. The least she could do is let someone who was clearly a pro teach her how to properly protect her hands. So she shrugged and unwrapped the towel she had loosely tied around her right hand, holding it out for the Black Widow to wrap with her magic extra-support linens.

“You start at the wrist,” her voice was much friendlier than her actions, which were terse and precise, all business, “Wrap down three inches past that joint that sticks out on your wrist and then back up. Over your palms, across your knuckles,” and her own hands mirrored her instructions, dancing with obvious familiarity around Darcy’s bruised and swollen knuckles, “Then you make an X out of the wrappings. Sort of. Pull the gauze back down toward your wrist, wrap it around, then up across your palm again. And this is the part you’ll probably forget when you do it yourself; wrap it around your thumb, then around your palm, then go between each of your fingers.”

“That’s the weirdest feeling in the world.” Darcy commented as the fabric wove between her fingers, effectively forcing them into a fairly spread position. 

The Black Widow nodded. “You get used to it.” she commented, “After the fingers, you’re basically done. Wrap all the way down to the bottom of your wrist and back up again for extra reinforcement. And then tie it off. You want to try the other one?”

“Uh,” Darcy attempted to move her already swollen and bruised fingers but they felt extra incapable of movement after all of the fabric that had been bundled up around them, “Yeah, not so much.” she replied honestly, “I think I’ll just watch the expert in action again. You know, make sure I didn’t miss anything the first time.”

The Black Widow nodded, still seeming indifferent, and moved to wrap Darcy’s left hand. She repeated her directions a second time, adding a few tips and pointers that Darcy appreciated receiving. When she was finished with the left hand, the older woman stepped back and inspected her work. Satisfied, she gave a curt nod. 

“At this point, putting those gloves on over your wrapped hands will probably be the biggest challenge. Especially with such damaged fingers.” the agent told her honestly, “But you should do it. They’re light gloves, they weigh practically nothing, but they’re the best defense your hands have against making contact with that heavy bag. And they’ve been abused enough, they need as much defense as they can get.”

Darcy glanced down at the gloves, still resting where they had landed on the floor after bouncing off of her chest. She was debating between struggling to put them on in front of the Black Widow, which would undoubtedly make her look even more ridiculous and just add to her massive list of embarrassing moments, or _not_ struggling to put them on and hoping that the Black Widow would leave soon. She knelt down and picked up the dark gloves, eyeing them uncertainly.

“Thanks,” she finally said, having turned the gloves over in her hands and thoroughly inspected them, “For, you know, all of this. Should I bring these back to you when I’m done, or just...I don’t even know where your rooms are.” she admitted lamely.

The Black Widow shrugged and shook her head. “I got them for you. They’re yours now. Use them.” And then she turned to leave, reaching the door on the opposite side of the room in only a few strides. She turned as she reached for the handle, pausing before she opened the door. “And I meant what I said. Your hands have been really abused. Find some epsom salt, pour it into a bowl of water, and let your hands soak in it for twenty minutes, multiple times a day. It’ll help with the bruising and the strain on your muscles and tendons.”

And then she opened the door, closed it, and was gone. And Darcy was still standing there, gaping, trying to process everything. Agent Sexy Thing One had just spent the past ten minutes talking to her. _Her_! Darcy Lewis! She had basically gotten a boxing lesson from the world’s most dangerous assassin! Well, a boxing lesson minus the actual, you know, boxing part. But still. She was pretty sure this was definitely the coolest thing that had ever happened to her in her entire life. And also the most humiliating. But she was coping. 

She wasn’t entirely sure how blasphemous it was to think this, but Darcy was almost entirely positive that this interaction with the Black _freaking_ Widow was even more awesome than the day she tased Thor, God of Thunderlicious Biceps.

And to commemorate the moment, she got down on her hands and knees and did the world’s most embarrassing set of pushups anyone could have ever encountered. She _did_ want to take this seriously, shitty white dude afros or not.

* * *

The Black Widow hadn’t warned her that pushups sucked more than anything else in the world. Or that doing them every day would make her feel like her arms had been torn from her shoulders and sewn back on by Dr. Frankenstein. Between the epsom salt soaks - which were a gift from the gods, seriously - and the newly discovered hand and wrist protection, her hands had stopped aching every time she tried to hold a pencil. But the less her hands hurt, the more she noticed her shoulders hurting, and her upper arms, and also the muscles under boobs. Seriously, pushups sucked.

A week later, Darcy was in the middle of reciting her new favorite mantra, “Man I hate pushups, man I hate pushups, man I hate pushups,” while doing said pushups when a sultry voice interrupted her. 

“I guess you do want to take this seriously.”

And Darcy did the only thing she possibly could have done in that situation. She squeaked in surprise, lost her concentration, and felt her arms give out on her. She wished she could say this was the first time she had collapsed onto the blue mats that covered the gym’s floor, but unfortunately for her in the constant struggle that was Darcy Lewis versus pushups the pushups frequently won. She groaned as her face pressed against the familiar blue material and rolled just enough to push herself into an awkward half-sitting position.

“Seriously?” she demanded when a familiar head of bright red hair caught her eyes, “Doesn’t anyone in this entire building announce themselves when they break into locked rooms?”

The Black Widow raised a single eyebrow. “Is there a proper way to announce yourself to someone who isn’t expecting anyone to interrupt them?” she countered.

“Pretty sure you passed up any opportunity to do something ‘ _proper_ ’ when you barged into a locked room,” Darcy groused, “But a simple, 'hey I just finished breaking and entering _again_ , Tony should really upgrade his lock systems' like right after you open the door would suffice. And if not that, the least you could do is wait until a girl’s not going to embarrass herself before you scare the crap out of her. I mean, I was mid pushup. And this is me we’re talking about. That could have ended a lot worse. I could have broken my nose or something.”

The Black Widow nodded. “Or you could have just ignored me and continued with your warm up.” she pointed out.

Darcy snorted. “Yeah, that’s totally something I could have done.” She was practically drowning in her own sarcasm.

“You should do some situps when you’re done.” the older woman commented in a matter of fact tone, completely refusing to acknowledge Darcy’s statement, “Core strength is critical to anything you want to do with boxing. It’ll help your balance when you move into punches. It’ll add strength to your hits --”

“Plus it’ll give me that great beach bod, just in time for the summer.” Darcy cut her off with her least impressed expression, accompanied by her patented eyeroll. 

The Black Widow stopped talking and raised an eyebrow again. Darcy felt like a small child being scolded. Why did everyone in this building make her feel like a scolded child? She sighed.

“Okay, fine, situps after pushups. Noted.” she drawled. Then, as if suddenly realizing who she was speaking to she sat upright. “You were right about the pushups though,” she added, and then she felt as the self-consciousness took over, “I mean, I guess it’s only been a week, so maybe I can’t really tell, but it seems like they’re probably helping. My arms feel like two sacks of dough attached to my torso, so that has to mean something’s happening, right?”

“Something’s definitely happening.” the Black Widow acknowledged with a nod, “Now if you’re done with those pushups, situps.”

Darcy opened her mouth to protest everything about the situation - the Black Widow had already seen her fall in the middle of throwing a punch and fall in the middle of a pushup, the last thing she wanted was for the woman to witness her somehow managing to fall during a situp, she had Jarvis lock the door for a reason! - but she was cut off before any sound managed to make its way past her vocal cords.

“You’re not wearing attire appropriate to this either.” she commented dryly, giving Darcy a once over that left her feeling waves of embarrassment.

“Yeah, well I’m not really into announcing to a tower full of superheroes that I’m in the mood to dabble in athletics.” Darcy said slowly, as if explaining something to a small child, “People would probably notice if Darcy Lewis, unathletic research assistant extraordinaire, suddenly started walking around in spandex leggings and a sports bra. So I figured,” here she threw in a careless shrug for emphasis, “Why not just wear my regular clothes? I'm not really doing anything all that athletically impressive anyway, don't need extra flexible leggings and boob support to just stand here and hit things.”

The Black Widow looked unimpressed. “If you really wanted to be inconspicuous you would hide your hands more. And I would hardly call months of practice ‘dabbling.’” she informed the younger woman. 

“You'd be surprised how little people notice injuries around here.” Darcy commented in an offhanded sort of way, as if discussing the weather, “Must be because you're all throwing yourselves at giant titanium robots all the time...probably leaves a bit of bruising.”

Agent Sexy Thing One still looked completely unimpressed with Darcy’s explanation. “Are you done justifying your lack of proper attire?” she inquired.

Darcy actually paused for a moment to think about it. She raised a hand already wrapped in the gauze the Black Widow had given her a week ago and tapped her finger against her chin in mock contemplation. Just because she could. “You know, I don’t think I am.” Hey, if the Black Widow could be snarky, so could Darcy Lewis! “I’m pretty sure that if I ever need to use this terrible porno kickboxing routine, it’ll probably be because some idiot tried to steal my purse in a dark alley in the middle of the night or something. I’ll probably be wearing jeans and a sweatshirt then, I might as well learn how to punch people in them now. Get used to it. Right?”

And this time when the Black Widow raised a single eyebrow, Darcy thought it was probably out of respect. She was pretty sure she had made a fairly legit point. She even made a show of looking casually at her nails after her comment, just to emphasize that she was totally knowledgeable about being prepared in a street-smart sort of way.

“Alright,” the Black Widow confirmed with a curt nod, “You’ve made a valid point. Keep doing the pushups, they work. And the situps.”

Darcy was so unprepared for the Black Widow’s departure that she wasn’t fully aware she was leaving until the door had already closed behind her. Well, that was odd. Agent Sexy Thing One had literally broken into the gym _just_ to tell her to do situps. And wear spandex. Was this her life now? 

“Jarvis, lock the door again please.” She called to the ever-present bodiless AI. And then she stretched herself out and bent her knees, letting all of the breath out of her lungs before squeezing the muscles in her stomach and heaving herself up far enough for her elbows to touch her knees. “Please don’t let me hate situps.” she mumbled to whatever gods were listening.

* * *

The very next day found Darcy sluggishly hitting the heavy bag suspended from the ceiling. She wasn’t sure what was worse, the fact that her stomach felt like someone had used it as a punching bag or the fact that her arms still felt as if they were heavy, mushy bags of bread dough or the fact that these two things combined made it absolutely impossible for her to move her arms forward for quick jabs at the bag. The next time Darcy saw the Black Widow, she would tell her exactly where she could shove her pre-workout warmup advice.

“I just finished breaking and entering again, Tony should really upgrade his lock systems.”

For the first time since the Black Widow had started popping up in her life, Darcy managed to stay standing. This was probably entirely due to the fact that every muscle from her waist upward burned and protested heavily any time she moved. All of her actions were too sluggish to result in startled reactions leading to embarrassing stumbles and falls. She still squeaked in shock, but that could probably be forgiven.

“Hey, look who finally learned some breaking and entering manners.” Darcy noted sarcastically, rolling her eyes at the super spy, “I guess I have to give you points for remembering the proper line too.” and if she added a little extra emphasis to word ‘ _proper_ ’ because she felt a little sassy, who could blame her?

“Really, this is getting too easy. And this place is supposed to have state of the art security.” The Black Widow was standing at the door smirking. Darcy had made the Black Widow smirk. _The_ Black Widow!

“Honestly I sometimes think Tony gets way more credit for his inventions than he deserves,” Darcy agreed blandly with the straightest face she could manage. She paused the infamous Youtube video, wishing that it wouldn’t be as embarrassing to be caught following along to it a second time as it was. “Did you come by with more painful advice? Because I’ve seriously started doubting your intentions when I woke up this morning and wondered if I was going into labor or something.”

Something in the Black Widow’s face shifted at Darcy’s words and she looked almost… _shy_? Darcy wondered briefly if this was her normal human face that she hid away under her Agent Sexy Thing One, Destroyer of Worlds mask. 

“Actually,” her voice was also different, softer maybe, “I was wondering if I could do my own routine in here, while you finish your own practice?”

Was she dreaming again? “What?”

“Do you mind?” The spy’s eyes were very large and doe-like in her petite face and Darcy had the distinct feeling she was on the receiving end of the Black Widow’s version of ‘puppy-dog face.’ Compared to other puppy-dog faces she had encountered, the Black Widow’s sucked. But just seeing any expression other than the impassive, guarded look she typically wore was enough to sway Darcy’s opinion at least the tiniest bit. 

Darcy wondered briefly whether she was even capable of saying no to the freaking Black Widow. Could she really deny the woman who she practically drooled over on news reports? “No.” Well, that answered that question then.

“Thanks. I won’t take up much room, I promise. I’ll just,” and she walked as if she was floating on air, “Stay in this corner over here.”

“Yeah,” Darcy let the words drag themselves slowly from her lips, “And maybe put on earplugs while you’re at it.”

“Oh, your music won’t bother me,” the other woman assured her, “I don’t need music for this. Just my breath.”

“You say that now…” Darcy murmured disbelievingly to herself.

A very large part of her was outrageously self-conscious about doing anything physical in front of the woman who was probably the most physically fit person in this entire building. Maybe even the entire world. But an even _larger_ part of Darcy was vindictive. And in pain. A _lot_ of pain. And it’s entirely possible that the vindictive side of her just wanted to turn her laptop all the way up and punish the Black Widow for telling her to do pushups and situps by blasting this horrible 80’s porno music at top volume. So she did. Let’s see how much, “step forward, turn, jab, step back,” SHIELD’s top agent could handle before needing to exit the room.

As it turned out, the Black Widow could handle at least the full twenty-two minutes of the video that remained. Darcy was a sweating mess by the time the music and instructions stopped, but she had at least managed to hit the heavy bag more than half of the time. Which was a massive improvement. After the video had ended, she took her first glance at the Black Widow since she had begun playing the Youtube video, curious about what the super spy's routine would involve. She actually choked on her own water when she saw the other woman rounding her arms over her head and moving into a position that looked exactly like something she had seen on the cover of a yoga dvd. The Black Widow held the position for a few moments, while Darcy attempted to stop coughing on the water lodged in her throat, and then moved smoothly and slowly into another position that Darcy had seen on another yoga dvd.

Yep. The Black Widow, world’s top assassin, was definitely in a corner of the gym doing _yoga_ of all things. Darcy couldn’t really believe her eyes. _That_ was the Black Widow’s ‘routine’? Women who drank juice made out of freaking _grass_ did yoga! Women who couldn’t open the lid of a jar did yoga! This was the Black freaking Widow! This was the woman who Darcy had seen lift an entire alien over her head and launch it at another alien! And she was doing _yoga_. This had to be an extremely elaborate dream. All of it. Every encounter she had with the Black Widow in the past week just had to be a figment of her imagination.

“This is the most realistic dream I have ever had in my entire life.” she said aloud, just to break the silence that had filled the room since the Youtube video had ended.

“You dream about me often?” the Black Widow’s tone was so playful Darcy almost choked on her water again.

“You can make jokes?” she demanded before she even realized she had opened her mouth.

“I make a lot of jokes, most people can’t tell I’m not being serious.” 

“Probably because of your face.” Darcy commented seriously without thinking. And when her brain finally caught up with her mouth she almost ran out of the room. _Almost_. “I mean, not like you’re ugly or anything. Just, serious. Face made of stone, kind of thing. I mean, beautiful stone. Like marble. Marble statue. Not that you’re a statue. Holy crap, stop talking Darcy.” And miraculously, she did.

Luckily, the Black Widow didn’t seem to take anything personally. “Face like marble, bad for jokes, noted.”

“Not like I’m the joke master or anything myself,” Darcy offered, as if it was some sort of consolation that they could suck at being funny together.

The Black Widow continued to shift from pose to pose as fluidly as water flows over rocks and down a stream. Her ability to converse while twisting herself into the most awkward contortions left Darcy a little jealous, but mostly just confused. Some day, when she was certain the Black Widow wouldn’t turn around and mock her own 80's porno routine, she would ask what a SHIELD agent was doing calling yoga a 'workout routine.' 

“You know,” Darcy began slowly, taking another sip of water and sitting down on the ground, enjoying the break from her own workout, “I don't even know what to call you. I only know your code name. And it feels weird enough referring to you as ‘the Black Widow’ in my head whenever you’re around. Actually calling you that aloud is just super creepsville. Like I should beg for your autograph and grovel on the pavement afterward or something.”

“Romanov.” The Black Widow leaned forward on her arms and stretched a leg up into the air, “Natasha Romanov.”

Natasha Romanov. Darcy liked the sound of that. She rolled it over in her mind a few times before something rather poignant stuck out. “Don’t you mean Romanova?” she asked before she could stop herself. 

The Black Widow, Natasha Romanov, paused in her routine and turned slightly to fix Darcy with the full focus of her gaze. She arched an eyebrow, yet remained silent.

“It’s just, Russian last names for women...ova, not ov.” Darcy rushed to explain herself, “I mean, you are Russian, right? The name is pretty Russian.”

She received a nod, but still no words.

“I always thought women took on the ‘ova’ ending in last names. And the ‘ov’ ending was reserved for boys. And now I’m feeling like an idiot.” she concluded lamely, rubbing the back of her neck with her free hand.

“Do you speak Russian?” Natasha finally asked her, after letting the silence stretch on for an uncomfortable amount of time.

“Nope.” Darcy popped the ‘p’ in the word, a habit that typically surfaced whenever she was nervous, “I’ve just taken a fair share of Russian policy classes, back when I was still working on my degree. You pick up a few things about culture and social norms when you study a country’s government long enough.”

Natasha nodded, and finally resumed her routine, moving to stretch her body into another awkward pose. Darcy let out a breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding. “You’re right,” Natasha mentioned as she stretched her arms above her head, “Typically all female surnames end in an ‘a’.”

Darcy nodded. She knew she was right. “So what happened to your name then?” she demanded before she could stop herself.

Natasha smirked, but Darcy couldn’t see it. “I decided I wanted to be a little different. Can’t blame a girl for trying.” 

“Pretty sure you’re winning the ‘being different’ game,” Darcy mumbled under her breath. If Natasha heard her, she didn’t acknowledge it in any way. Darcy was debating between going for round two of Mr. Mullet and his fantastic sidekick, or learning more about the woman currently wrapping her legs around her own head in the corner of the room. The freaky leg flexibility won out. “So, you were born there?” she tried to affect a casual tone, to seem less interested than she actually was, “In Russia, I mean.”

Natasha didn’t nod or shake her head, but Darcy assumed it was probably impossible to move your head when both of your legs were wrapped around it. “I was.” she answered simply.

Darcy nodded to herself, stashing away this information in her very slowly growing log of personal information about her Tower-mates. She couldn’t really call them ‘roommates,’ none of them shared rooms. At least not as far as Darcy knew. Well, except for Tony and Pepper...but they were kind of a weird type of couple-thing. So that was to be expected.

“Did you stay there long?” she persisted.

Again the Black Widow answered with words instead of body movements. “I grew up there. Didn’t really see much of the world at all until I was a full grown woman.”

Darcy’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. That didn’t make any sense at all! “But your English accent is flawless!” she couldn’t keep the disbelief from her voice, no matter how hard she tried, “I never would have known that you didn’t spend at least _some_ of your childhood growing up here in the states.” She meant it as a compliment, but it sounded almost like an insult for some reason. And then her mouth continued along the same thought her mind was following, saying the words aloud as she mentally processed them, “Maybe you could give the twins some pointers.” 

Natasha chuckled at that but didn’t comment any further, and Darcy found herself interrupted from any further prying by Jarvis’s ethereal voice announcing that Jane needed her in the labs immediately. Typically, that meant the world would be sucked into a black abyss if Darcy didn’t make it down to the lab quickly enough to help Jane fiddle with whatever took more than two hands to fiddle with. 

So she took a last sip of water, grabbed her laptop, and left the room at a rather brisk pace for someone who had just been hitting a punching bag for the last thirty minutes. She managed to call out a somewhat hasty, definitely awkward departing greeting to Natasha before she left the room, but the door was closing and she was already halfway down the hall by the time the Black Widow responded. 

She missed the ominous, “See you next time,” that the SHIELD agent had left hanging in the air. Had she caught those final words, she probably wouldn’t have squeaked in shock and almost punched Natasha when she came to Darcy’s workout again the very next day.

* * *

Wanda Maximoff was probably the most interesting person Darcy had met so far. Which is saying a lot considering she was friends with a Norse god from another planet and had met a bunch of superheroes who, for all intents and purposes, were basically weird enough to count as coming from other planets. Darcy would be the first to admit that she didn’t really know many of the Avengers well, or at all, but she was pretty sure that even if she ever _did_ get a chance to know them all better, none of them would be as interesting as Wanda Maximoff.

Wanda was constantly surprising Darcy and leaving her both completely comfortable with and completely confused by every interaction they had. The woman had instigated a number of conversations in the past week that she refused to keep going herself, most often refusing to speak for so long that Darcy would just leave the room rather than be forced to play out both sides of their conversation herself. Wanda would also frequently ask questions that Darcy was pretty sure a simple Google search could find the answers to, and then she would stare expectantly at Darcy after Darcy had answered the questions as if expecting her to just continue talking about...something. 

Not to mention, nearly every time Darcy found Wanda she was eating some kind of sugary cereal, no matter what time of day it was. To each his own and all, and she wasn’t really one to judge people much, but Darcy had definitely decided that Wanda Maximoff was interesting. And that was the most polite term she could find for the woman. 

Honestly, it surprised her how _interesting_ Wanda could be. Didn’t the woman have the ability to read minds? Couldn’t she tell when she was doing or saying weird things? Hadn’t she figured out how to mimic what people expected of her by now? She was obviously putting good abilities to waste, in Darcy’s opinion. 

None of it changed the fact that a small part of Darcy became just the slightest bit excited every time she saw Wanda. Wanda was the only person in the entire Tower who let her ramble about whatever global catastrophes she had become fixated on in the last few hours. Wanda was also the only person in the entire Tower who seemed honestly interested in what Darcy liked to ramble on about. Well, Wanda and Pietro. But Pietro sometimes also looked like he wanted to kill her, so she definitely preferred Wanda's interest over her brother's. It was a little bit depressing how much Darcy relied on the few morsels of acknowledgement she could scrounge up from interactions with Wanda, and she found herself wondering what Wanda got out of all of their interactions. The female Maximoff had made at least one appearance a day in Darcy’s life for the last two weeks. She was beginning to become slightly unnerved by it, honestly. Especially when considering the fact that when the twins first moved in, she and Wanda had gone a whole three months without bumping into each other more than a handful of times. 

Slightly unnerved, but honestly mostly just relieved. It was starting to feel comfortable, the way they awkwardly made attempts at normal human interaction with one another. If she didn’t know any better, Darcy would _almost_ consider whatever they were doing to be the beginning stages of blooming friendship. _Almost_. Except for the fact that Wanda’s brother clearly hated Darcy’s guts, and probably talked shit about her all the time behind her back. She imagined that was probably putting a halt on whatever new friendship she and Wanda could form. 

So she would be lying if she said that she was sad that Pietro Maximoff was nowhere to be found at the moment, and Darcy could have Wanda all to herself. Well, until she got too weirded out by Wanda’s silence and left the room, that is. One day, she would teach the Eastern Europeans how to hold a proper conversation, complete with responses. One day.

“You know, Jane was super psyched when you moved into the Tower,” Darcy admitted as the women sat shoulder to shoulder on the floor of the living room. They were sitting in front of the window that took up the entire back wall, watching as the last light faded from the day. “She wouldn’t stop talking about the potential of electro-magnetic something or another being in the air. Like, you reading minds proves that this mega weirdly bonded force system exists, or something. And if these two forces can bond then she can do something awesome with a time machine or portal maker or whatever the heck she’s always rambling on about. Anyway,” Darcy stretched her arms up over her head and leaned forward so that her forehead pressed against the glass of the window, “I’m just saying that I’m surprised she hasn’t basically hunted you down and begged you to sit in her neuro-impulse scanner thing.”

Wanda remained silent for a few seconds and Darcy found herself wondering what she always wondered in these awkward stretches of time where the Maximoff woman said nothing; _what could she possibly be thinking about for so long?_ Eventually Wanda spoke, her question honestly the last thing Darcy had expected to come out of her mouth after everything she had just been told.

“You believe this is all I can do?” Darcy was learning the subtlety of Wanda’s quiet tones and detected what she was beginning to recognize as shock in the woman’s voice as she questioned, “Only read minds? You think this is all?”

Darcy wasn’t sure what the right answer to this question was. What could she possibly say that wasn’t insulting. “Umm,” she paused and pressed her forehead closer to the glass, “Yeah?” Honesty. Simple honesty, that was always the route she decided to follow.

Wanda nodded, but it seemed like she was nodding more to herself than to Darcy. “This is not all.” she murmured. And Darcy saw out of the corner of her eye as she pressed her thin lips very firmly together. “Would you like to know what else I do?”

Darcy finally pulled her head away from the glass and looked over to Wanda, but Wanda’s eyes were focused on the world that stretched out before them. The endless amounts of concrete and metal and glass covered skyscrapers, all competing for the sun’s attention, all trying to reach higher toward the sky than their neighboring buildings, they all seemed to capture Wanda’s full attention. Darcy wondered what this world looked like through Wanda’s eyes, and even through Pietro’s. It must be so different here in New York. So different from Sokovia.

“It’s not going to drastically change my opinion of you, is it?” she asked sarcastically, “You can’t like kill babies with your mind or anything, can you?”

“I would not know.” Wanda answered truthfully. And Darcy wondered which question she was answering with those words. “Would you like to see what I do? Other than read minds.”

If Darcy was being honest with herself, she would _definitely_ like to see what Wanda did. A minute ago she hadn’t even known there was anything to see, and now it was all she could think about. But she didn’t want the other woman to know that, to have another reminder that Darcy was just the most average, ordinary person surrounded by so many more-than-average people. So she tried to play it off as casually as she could. “If it won’t damage much of Tony’s living room, sure. Go for it.” she offered with a shrug.

At this statement Wanda’s eyes sparkled mischievously and she spared Darcy a quick glance so the other woman could see it. “Not much of it, no.” she affirmed, with tones Darcy thought might considered playful. 

And then she raised her right hand and the most delicate red lights that Darcy had ever seen danced around her open palm. For half a second Darcy thought that this was Wanda’s other power, and was already mesmerized. But then movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention and she watched as a fairly dense looking marble bust of some dead president or another came floating towards Wanda. It was also surrounded by the same delicate red lights that danced around Wanda’s hand and Darcy found herself reaching out to touch the light as the statue came closer to the women. 

She was fairly surprised when her hand went straight through the red lights and touched the marble of the bust beneath them. It was disconcerting to see your hand surrounded by something that you couldn’t feel at all. It was as if Wanda’s magic didn’t have any palpable substance to it; but that was _impossible_ because it was capable of picking up solid marble and moving it! Surely it had to have some form or substance to it.

“Oh, you would feel it if it was moving you,” Wanda assured her, and Darcy quirked an eyebrow at her in the way she was growing accustomed to doing when she needed to remind the mindreader that her mind was off limits. Wanda didn’t look the slightest bit ashamed at having been caught snooping through Darcy’s thoughts, her focus was fixed on the chunk of marble that was slowly lowering itself into her hand. “Pietro tells me it feels like moving through thick tar when I use my powers to move him, or keep him from moving, in some way. ‘Like tar is wrapped around me and pushing me forward and moving me back at the same time, and I can grab at it and hold it and pull on it but it will never move,’ he says.”

Darcy took a moment to imagine what that must feel like. Then she took a second moment to imagine how either of the Maximoffs could possible know what moving through tar felt like. Were there tar pits in Sokovia? “I think I’ll pass on the demonstration of what it feels like then, thanks.” she commented flatly.

Wanda nodded. Her hand began to glow again and the same red light surrounded the marble bust milliseconds before it lifted back into the air and floated at a much more rapid pace to the middle of the room. When Wanda shifted its course before setting it back on the pedestal she had retrieved it from and instead sent it further to the left, toward the doorless frame that led to the hallway, Darcy raised an eyebrow. Before she could open her mouth to ask what exactly Wanda intended to do with a floating replica of a dead president, the statue began to glow quite brightly. And then it burst. Literally exploded. Shattered into a million tiny shards that flew out in every direction and then paused suddenly, each shard suspended in the air as if time itself had ceased before gravity could take hold and pull the destroyed bits of marble to the ground. 

Darcy watched in awe as every fragment shone with a pulsing red glow. It was pure magic. Wanda was pure magic.

And then something happened, time started again perhaps, gravity remembered itself again perhaps, Wanda became bored with sustaining so many small insignificant pieces in their quest to remain airborne perhaps, and the red lights simultaneously disappeared and thousands of marble shards fell to the wooden floors below, the sound of the impact with ground reminiscent of rain on a cottage roof. 

“That was the most beautiful thing I’ve seen since I met Leonardo Dicaprio,” Darcy breathed the most honest sentence she had spoken since she came to Avengers Tower. She turned to Wanda, wide-eyed and starstruck, “You’re incredible.”

Wanda acknowledged the compliment with a slight incline of her head and small smile that Darcy knew she was trying to hide. But she said nothing. 

“You know that bust probably could have fed a family for months.” Darcy commented wryly, only capable of being slightly upset by the wasteful nature of Wanda’s display. “Americans love their dead presidents. And marble. They’d probably have paid tens of thousands of dollars for that.”

“I did say I would damage Stark’s living room, no?” Wanda pointed out and, yeah, Darcy was pretty convinced those were definitely playful tones she had detected earlier, “There is nothing in this room that would not feed families for months.”

“Touche.” Darcy grumbled, her eyes still glued to the spot near the entryway where she had seen Wanda make a statue _explode_ mere moments ago. “So, is that everything then? You can read minds, move stuff, and blow shit up?”

Wanda nodded slowly, her expression pensive. “For now, yes.”

“For now?” Darcy repeated with raised eyebrows. But Wanda refused to answer her implied inquiry. A silence settled between them that was so comfortable Darcy almost welcomed it. She probably would have even let it remain this time, since it seemed to be Wanda’s preferred mode of existence, except for the niggling need for knowledge that was eating away at the back of her mind. “So what about your brother, Mister Anger Management Issues?”

Wanda had turned back to the window now, eyeing the city skyline as it twinkled against the night sky. “What about him?” she asked.

“What’s his deal?” Darcy asked, “Do you two have matching powers or what?”

Wanda looked honestly startled when she turned her head quickly to meet Darcy’s eyes. Her own seemed to gaze deeply into Darcy’s and then widened in a way that showed her complete shock and yet still allowed her to maintain her serious expression. “You do not know Pietro’s gift?” she demanded, her tones matching her expression.

Darcy shrugged casually. “Nope.”

Wanda gazed at her for a few more moments, completely silent and completely still. Finally she turned her intense eyes back toward the window and shook her head, sighing to herself. “Then it is not my place to tell you.” she finally murmured after a few minutes of silence, “It is his gift, and his alone. He chooses who to share it with. You must ask _him_ about it, not me.”

Darcy snorted quite loudly and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that’s not happening.” she stated firmly, “I can’t get within ten feet of him without him looking like he wants my head to explode.” At her own words her mind brought forth the very recent memory of the presidential bust exploding into a million pieces and she turned fully toward Wanda, her entire body cold with fear as she imagined her head replacing the presidential statue. “That’s not his thing, is it? Exploding heads?” 

Everything about Wanda was completely impossible to read. Whatever she was thinking, she gave nothing away. She didn’t shift in the slightest at Darcy’s near accusation. She didn’t blink, and Darcy was pretty sure she didn’t even breathe. And she refused to answer. That much was clear. So Darcy took a few moments to even out her breathing and to tell herself to ask Jane to invent an anti-head-exploding machine. And then she tried to even out her voice as much as possible so that her comment sounded less panicked and more disinterested.

“Well, regardless, I doubt I'll ever be able to get close enough to him sans anger to have an actual conversation, much less ask him about whatever freaky voodoo he's capable of doing now and days.” she stated firmly, rather proud of the fact that her voice didn’t shake when she imagined him making her head explode the way Wanda had made the statue explode.

And Wanda's expression became so distant for a moment that Darcy almost opened her mouth to tell her to stop poking around her head. Almost. There was something about the quality of Wanda's expression that made her stop - a certain understanding or knowledge was present in her eyes that made Darcy doubt she was actually reading her mind. It didn't stave off the curiosity, but it did make her reconsider her words. What did Wanda know?

The rest of the evening passed between the two women in silence. Darcy, for the first time since she had really met Wanda, didn’t try to fill the space with meaningless words and instead realized how incredibly nice it could be to just… _exist_ with another human being, breathing the same air, sharing the same space, but having the distance to think their own thoughts in peace. Neither woman seemed to have any expectations of entertainment from the other. They could both just _be_. It was nice. 

And then Jarvis had to ruin the moment, conveying a message from Jane about how she had sent Darcy out for dinner hours ago and still didn’t have any food. 

“Darce, seriously, did you drive all the way to Chicago for some deep dish pizza or something? What could possibly be taking so long?” And Darcy laughed because hearing those words in Jarvis’s inexpressive, monotone vocal patterns was probably the most hilarious thing she had heard all day. 

“Well,” Darcy groaned as she gathered her feet underneath her and pushed herself into a sitting position, pushups and situps were going to be the death of her, all of her torso ached any time she moved, “I guess this is where I make some awkward goodbye speech.”

Wanda nodded, but didn’t turn away from the window. “Or this could be the first time you do not.” she offered in her even tone.

Darcy snorted. “Yeah, that’s probably not going to happen.” she admitted, already halfway to the door and suddenly realizing that the fact that there was shattered marble everywhere was definitely going to be a problem for her bare feet. A slight red glow surrounded a small group of the shards and they moved themselves to clear a path for Darcy to walk as if she had commanded them herself. “What did I say about reading my mind?” she called over to Wanda as she made her way to the doorless entryway.

Wanda’s answer was rather pert. “Who is to say that I am not merely a considerate person, who remembers to clean up her messes when company leaves?”

Darcy rolled her eyes. But then something made her pause at the door and she turned back to look at Wanda, whose back was facing her as she gazed out of the window. “Hey, thank you.” Darcy said in the most sincere tones she could convey, “For showing me...everything.” Wanda turned toward her at her words and Darcy wondered what her expression meant, “It seemed really personal, to show me what you could do like that. So, thanks. For, you know, trusting me I guess.”

Wanda held her gaze for a few very long, very intense moments. And by the time she nodded her head in acknowledgement and turned away, Darcy felt like she had just received the most sincere form of gratitude any human could possibly bestow upon another.

Wanda Maximoff was _definitely_ the most interesting person Darcy had met in Avengers Tower.

* * *

The thing that nobody tells you about exercise is that it’s the most brutal form of torture you can put yourself through, with the most unexpected benefits. Apparently, any time you strain your body, it releases endorphins. Darcy learned this accidentally, through a Google search gone wrong when she was trying to prove to Captain Star Spangled Underpants that his 1940’s view of sex and marriage was ruining his ability to be extra happy. As it turns out, sex _does_ release a flood of endorphins, which make you extra happy, into your brain’s nervous system. So one point to Darcy on that. But apparently, so does punching a big heavy blue bag repeatedly all day long; which is apparently all Steve Rogers does with his time. So one point to Steve as well. Darcy was not at all pleased with the unexpected information since it took away from the valid point she was trying to make about Steve needing more ladies, or dudes, in his life.

While she was displeased, she couldn’t say it surprised her all that much. She had vaguely considered, somewhere in the very deepest part of her mind that she rarely admitted existed, the possibility that she was depressed when she had moved to Avengers Tower. Looking back now, all the symptoms seemed to be there; loss of interest in your life’s passions, mood swings, the inability to communicate properly with others. She just assumed that it had to do with obvious circumstances, like not being interested in politically charged subjects because she had no one to share her enthusiasm with, or having mood swings because, _hello_ , she was forced to give up her freaking _graduate_ degree for god’s sake! And the inability to communicate was obviously no fault of her own, considering the whack jobs and antisocial weirdos she lived with. So she hadn’t really allowed herself to consider the possibility that she was depressed, not really.

But since she had begun ‘working out,’ she noticed that she was actually interested in a lot of economic and political issues that she had stopped paying attention to in the months following her move. And she was able to have actual conversations with the Avengers. Well, sort of. If you counted rambling incessantly at silent Maximoffs or taking sarcastic jabs at the Black Widow as she did yoga while Darcy was practicing her latest kickboxing routine as actual conversations, then she was making some significant progress on that front. And the mood swings. Well, the mood swings probably wouldn’t go away until she could get out of this stupid freaking tower. So no amount of endorphins flooding her system could help that.

What was most notable, though, since she began working out was how driven Darcy was to just do _something_. Anything at all. She felt it every day, this intense motivation to stop running after Jane and just...just tell the whole world about Ghana and Monsanto and Nigeria and Guantanamo Bay and every other ridiculous political scandal that was being swept under the rugs and locked away in closets that would never be opened again. She wanted to run up to the top of Avengers Tower and scream from the roof about the corruption that surrounded everyone in this country, _especially_ here in New York with all these hedge funds and huge corporations. She had never felt so driven to share her knowledge with people in her entire life, not even when she was knee deep in writing a thesis about the drug cartels in South America. And she knew, without a doubt, that this drive was coming from the insane amounts of endorphins she was getting every time her arms strained underneath her body weight in the middle of a pushup or her knuckles bruised a little with the impact of making contact with that stupid blue heavy bag. 

She also knew that she couldn’t do _anything_ about this urge to show the world all the dirty things people with money keep locked away, not while she was restricted to life in the Tower. It was maddening for the first few weeks to feel this intense need and motivation and feel completely incapable of doing anything about it. And then one day, her laptop was open and she was reading an article published in a fairly well-recognized academic journal, and she found her answer.

She couldn’t do anything _drastic_ , maybe. She couldn't move to El Salvador and protest the weapons being funneled into the country by the United States. She couldn't move to Ghana and protest the corporations trying to buy all of the privately owned farms. So she decided to do the next best thing: write. She already had weeks’ worth of collected data on the Monsanto Bill piled up on her hard-drive. She could write a paper on the effects of mega agribusiness corporations on small private owned farms in Ghana. And then she could publish it. And show the world what it didn’t want to see. 

This one thought took on a life of its own and dictated nearly every moment of Darcy’s day. When she was in Jane’s lab, waiting for the scientist to need her to do something, she was pulling up as many articles and sources of data as she could find. When she wasn’t in Jane’s lab, or working on perfecting her right hook - which was still embarrassingly terrible - she was compiling the data and writing rough outlines of paragraphs that she hoped would shape the minds of the people who read them. Writing and publishing this article became the only thing Darcy could think about. But for the first time in years, Darcy felt like she had a purpose. For the first time in years Darcy felt like she had control of one single aspect of her life. No gods falling out of the sky or aliens or robots trying to take over the world could change that fact or take this away from her. This was something she could do. And this mattered.

The Avengers were going to save the world. Darcy Lewis was going to _change_ it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someone asked if I had a tumblr account that they could follow me on last chapter and I, honestly, didn't at that point. So I promptly fixed the problem by getting a tumblr account! Umm, I'm still not entirely sure what I'm going to do with it, but I'm definitely going to post any research that I'm doing for this story on it. So there will be tons of articles on politically "charged" topics, global awareness, events and milestones happening around the world that you might not know about...basically anything Political Scientist Darcy might be interested in :) I'll also post updates on the story as I finish chapters or write something cute that I feel like posting before the chapter goes up. Mostly, though, I think it would be awesome to actually have conversations with you guys on there! Check it out and say hello! It will make my day! :D
> 
> Oh yeah, here's the link to my [tumblr](http://youreillusive.tumblr.com/) :)


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